This article draws on Philip Barnard's model of the interactions between theory and practice, between basic and applied research, to investigate the paradox of reading as an experience both private and public. It uses internal reader experience as a starting point for exploration, evoking the concept of a readerly sense of presence as a selection…

Redefines reading as a meditative rather than a narrowly cognitive process. Decries instruction in reading for comprehension and assessment because it restricts opportunities to explore and "get lost" in reading. (HTH)

Describes a project in which children were given in-depth experiences with a range of quality stories and then were interviewed using a series of open-ended questions to obtain their responses. The project was intended to gain insight into the process by which children make sense and meaning from stories. (HTH)

Reviews the use of the ERIC index term "Reader Text Relationship" with a view to deriving a tentative definition of the term. (FL)

Discusses the theory that reading is more than the searching for meaning within a text. Argues that the meaning of a text actually is in the interaction between reader and text. (FL)

A study compared the literary response and character attribution processes of 40 undergraduate students on the basis of differences in their interpersonal construct repertoire, or "interpersonal cognitive complexity." No studies to date have explored the ways in which cognitive complexity influences readers' overall responses to…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of reader perspective on encoding, storage, and retrieval processes and how this effect differs as a function of cognitive style. In both experiments, subjects read a passage from one of two assigned perspectives (a burglar or a prospective home buyer) or from no assigned perspective. In the…

The review of the literature related to newspaper reading presented in this paper provides a useful background to educators seeking to broaden their understanding of newspaper research and its implications for classroom practice. The research is divided into readability studies, readership studies, and cognition, comprehension, and text analysis…

Reviews the research on how readers or listeners construct mental models of the situation a writer or speaker is describing. Narrative components and spatial models are discussed. (YP)

While story grammar and cognitive science theories of stories state or imply that a story will be more interesting if the protagonist experiences difficulty in attaining his or her goal, neither theory considers that the importance of the goal may also affect how interesting the story is. The structural-affect theory, however, defines stories on…

A study was conducted to test the findings of two earlier studies (Peeck l974 and Pressley l983) on the effects of occasional mismatches between verbal and pictorial content in children's retention of illustrated prose. While the Peeck study indicated a considerable impact of mismatched pictures, the Pressley study indicated that with some…

Examines the use of the repertory grid technique to describe student responses to the poem "Frost at Midnight" by Coleridge. (HOD)

Describes a comprehension strategies instruction program called Students Achieving Independent Learning (SAIL). Relates the program to reader response and transactional theories of reading. Shows how the program works in one school system. Compares SAIL with basal series instruction programs. (HB)

The spontaneous use of imaging and its relationships to verbal recall and literary analysis were investigated in a study in which 72 college students read a literary text under one of three sets of instructions that manipulated processing depth in an externally valid fashion. Imagery reports and free verbal recalls of the story were collected…

Studies how children negotiate the meaning of literature by examining how they responded when given the opportunity to retell a story directly after hearing it. (DF)