Purpose: The study examined the contributions of Spanish and English oral narrative skills to English reading among 95 early elementary dual language learners (DLLs) from Spanish-speaking homes in the United States. This sample of first- and third-grade DLL children attended Spanish-English dual language immersion programs and received language…

Milton's style of pronominal reference in his essay, "Areopagitica," leads to a lack of comprehension at times and to slow processing. His use of demonstrative pronouns makes it difficult to identify antecedents precisely and quickly. For example, in one case a reader must go back over 400 words to find an antecedent. His use of relative…

Working from theories of text grammar and logic, the authors suggest and tentatively confirm several hypotheses concerning the role of micro- and macro-structures in comprehension and recall of texts. (Text is in French.) (DB)

The reader's knowledge about how a message is woven into discourse plays an important role in reading comprehension. This article first reviews reasons for student difficulties in comprehension, sentence groups, and sense units and then presents a basic discourse framework and its applications for analyzing text passages. (Contains two…

A method of training pupils to read for total comprehension by an analytical approach is proposed. Specific techniques are suggested. (RM)

During oral and silent reading, retention was related to segment length and existence of sentence boundary. Next limits on retention were tested by increasing segment length and difficulty. Performance of less skilled readers was uniformly low; performance of skilled and older readers was again affected by length and sentence boundary. (Author/CP)

This paper discusses discourse comprehension with respect to individual differences. First, some general principles of discourse structure and the processing of discourse are presented. These principles emphasize the role of sentence and thematic structure. Second, possible sources of individual differences in discourse processing are discussed.…

Explores two approaches to discourse structure and comprehension. Illustrates that prior knowledge is ued in conjunction with cues to construct the macrostructure of the story. Provides evidence that text comprehension is based on the presentation of the propositions of the story. (PMJ)

Describes a question-answering procedure for probing the reader's internal representation of prose. Examines two dimensions of a reader's conceptual organization of plot: hierarchical level and relational density of propositions. (PMJ)

The primary goal of early reading instruction, according to this paper, should be to teach children to comprehend written discourse in a manner similar to that for oral discourse because both types of discourse require decoding ability--graphic or acoustic. The paper asserts that to simply design reading instruction to achieve the subgoal of…

The research and practical questions about the internal lexicon, the associated network of internal representation basic to word meaning, boil down to whether in reading English the phonological route is obligatory or optional. Since the English writing system is morphophonemic, not phonetic, access to the internal lexicon cannot and should not…

A study was designed to assess the effect of text format on the decoding and comprehension proficiency of third and fifth grade students. Subjects were 36 students at each grade level who completed a battery of comprehension and decoding measures and then read a set of four stories that had been especially constructed for the study. Each story…

The problems encountered by native Japanese-speakers in reading English as a second language are examined. The available literature on the subject as well as firsthand experiences in teaching English, developing reading materials, and conducting research projects are discussed. The discussion focuses on five major areas: the reading process; the…