High-stakes reading tests significantly influence one's future success, leading many second language learners to engage in intensive test preparation. This study examines nine TOEFL reading preparation lectures from two popular cram schools, or [foreign characters omitted] "hagwons," in Korea, with a total duration of five hours and…

Tests require a special kind of savvy, a kind of critical thinking and knowledge application that is not always a part of classroom reading experiences. Who better to teach you how to prepare your students for reading tests than someone who has written them? Charles Fuhrken has spent years working with several major testing companies and…

The main purpose of this study was to compare the strategies used by Chinese-speaking students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in a multiple-choice format reading comprehension test. The focus was on describing what students do when they are taking reading comprehension tests by asking students to verbalize their thoughts.…

Suggests techniques for teaching students to comprehend test questions in a manner that requires them to think about both what is in the question and what could be in the passage. (HOD)

Presents a compilation of strategies, exercises, and ideas that have been most helpful with students receiving private tutoring on the verbal portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). (RS)

Provides a brief review of test-wiseness research and discusses a model of direct instruction as an alternative to reading comprehension test-wiseness instruction. (FL)

Successful instructional strategies for enhancing the reading comprehension and comprehension test performance of learning disabled students are described. Students are taught to self-monitor their comprehension of expository materials and stories through recognition and analysis of recurrent elements and problem passages, content summarization,…

Test wiseness programs and computer assisted study skills instruction (CASSI) were found to be valuable resources for college reading and study skills instructors and students at St. Cloud State University (Minnesota). Two booklets on test wiseness cues were reorganized and used as computer programs to allow the information to be presented outside…

The Santa Fe Community College (Gainesville, Florida) offers courses to prepare students for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The two classes--one intermediate and one advanced--meet three times a week for three hours each session. Grammar explanations are presented during the first two classes each week, and students are offered…

Concludes that teaching fourth- and fifth-grade children to ask themselves questions about key points in a story significantly improved their performance on tests about story content. (FL)

Issued twice yearly, this journal focuses on materials of interest to teachers of reading at the college level. The five articles in this issue deal with the following topics: basic skills instruction, judging the success of college reading programs, the effect of copying or paraphrasing structurally-cued topic sentences on passage comprehension,…

Five essays for reading instructors at two-year colleges are provided in this issue of "Forum for Reading." First, Kent Smith notes the increased recruitment of underprepared students and argues that colleges are responsible for assuring that admissions personnel, administrators, and faculty know the types of students they can and cannot…

Discusses the Supplemental Instruction (SI) approach to teaching study skills using course content. Summarizes the methods used in SI review sessions and reviews data measuring the success of students involved in SI with implications for improving student performance in other difficult courses at the community college level. (SKC)

Scholastic Aptitude Test skills of dyslexics can be enhanced through use of special test administration arrangements and a structured program of vocabulary development, test-taking strategies, and a pattern of analysis to improve reading comprehension. Two case studies illustrate the impact of drill and reinforcement, multimodal imagery…

Designed to assist teachers in small schools with the improvement of curriculum and instruction and to help smaller districts which do not have curriculum personnel to comply with Washington's Student Learning Objectives (SLO) Law, this guide contains curriculum materials for teaching reading in content areas to grades 9-12. The objectives listed…