This study aims to determine the effectiveness of Fry readability-based digital storybooks on reading comprehension skills among elementary school students. The method used in this study was an experimental research design with a pretest-posttest control group design to measure students' reading comprehension skills. The sample of this study was…

Readers often struggle to identify the main ideas in expository texts. Existing research and instruction provide some guidance on how to encourage readers to identify main ideas. However, there is substantial variability in how main ideas are operationalized and how readers are prompted to identify main ideas. This variability hinders…

Readers often struggle to identify the main ideas in expository texts. Existing research and instruction provide some guidance on how to encourage readers to identify main ideas. However, there is substantial variability in how main ideas are operationalized and how readers are prompted to identify main ideas. This variability hinders…

Many digital reading applications have built-in features to control the presentation flow of texts by segmenting those texts into smaller linguistic units. Whether and how these segmentation techniques affect the readability of texts is largely unknown. With this background, the current study examined a recent proposal that a sentence-by-sentence…

Extensive reading is an approach to language learning that encourages learners to read a large quantity of easy reading material. A substantial body of research confirms the effectiveness of this approach for developing proficiency in both first (L1) and second (L2) languages. This paper explains what extensive reading is, why it is important, and…

Lack of reading fluency is a significant obstacle to children's ability to learn from text. In this study, we explored the effects of two practices used to scaffold fluency -- repeated reading of a passage and listening to a passage before reading it. Since the differences between these practices may be subtle, we employed eye tracking to measure…

Early in the 20th century, educators began looking for scientific methods for matching texts with readers. Some of the best minds in education dedicated themselves to this task, including Edward L. Thorndike, William S. Gray, Ralph Tyler, Edgar Dale, Irving Lorge, and Jeanne S. Chall. The purpose of this book is to bring students of reading into…

Designed to alert adult basic education teachers to the factors of readability and to suggest ways that some readability problems can be alleviated, this resource unit discusses the problems posed by readability formulas and suggests that teachers must both press for more readable adult texts and question intelligently the products of publishers…

The problems arising from treating word and sentence complexity as the direct causes of difficulty in comprehension are surveyed in this paper from the perspective of readability formulas. The basic choices and assumptions made in the development and use of readability formulas are discussed in relation to the larger question of text…

Argues that both redundancy and propositional analysis (a strategy for analyzing meaning in a text) help to reveal the nature of the reader-text interaction and are two of the important missing elements in readability. (FL)

This article reviews research concerning the organizational, selective, and connective aspects of reading and then assesses the impact of constructivism on four reading-related issues in the United States: (1) readability of texts; (2) assessment of reading ability; (3) instruction in reading; and (4) conception of literacy. The article argues…

The problems stated for this investigation were: (1) to determine the order of introduction of the common phoneme-grapheme correspondences needed for use in decoding of written words introduced in the elementary grades, and (2) to ascertain at what specific readability level a particular graphemic option occurred most frequently. A master word…

The papers included in this book focus on writing and reading across the curriculum. Beginning with an introduction by Malcolm P. Douglass, the book contains the following 25 titles: "Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum" (Malcolm P. Douglass); "A Deepening Understanding of Reading and Writing" (Walter Loban); "The…

Conceptualizations of the reading process and the nature of comprehension are discussed in relation to the Southwest Regional Laboratory (SWRL) Beginning Reading Program. A method of syntactic analysis is proposed to help identify segments of meaning in reading materials. Components for comprehension assessment and instruction based on auch an…

Summarizes 369 reports of reading research and divides them into six main areas: "Summaries of Specific Aspects of Reading Research", "Teacher Preparation and Practice,""Sociology of Reading, Physiology and Psychology of Reading,""The Teaching of Reading," and "Reading of Atypical Learners." (RB)