This monograph, the sixth in a series on the development of the reading process, is concerned with the development of reading comprehension. In the first chapter, "Comprehension in Listening and Reading: Same or Different," Joseph H. Danks analyzes the evidence for the proposition that tbe comprehension processes for language in print and language…

Third grade students' comprehension scores suggest that there is a significant difference between three modes of reception (oral reading, silent reading, and listening), with oral reading significantly more effective than silent reading in promoting comprehension. (HOD)

Notes the relationship between constructive comprehension and schema theory research and decries the lack of progress in applying these theoretical phenomena to the classroom. (MKM)

In an exploration of the comprehension process of the beginning reader, 16 first and second grade students were each asked to listen to two stories--one a narrative account and the other an expository passage-- and then immediately to retell them. Recall protocols were compared by propositional analysis for text-related superordinate and…

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)

Inference is discussed as a factor in the derivation of non-explicit antecedents and referents for three types of discourse anaphora: definite pronouns, "one"-anaphora, and verb phrase ellipsis. This derivation process is seen as being part of the normal process of text-understanding. It is claimed that the use of non-explicit…

Attempts have been made to develop a model of the process of reading comprehension as a whole that would indicate under what conditions and for what reasons a long sentence might be more effective than several short ones, when repetition is helpful and when distracting, when content is better left implicit in a text, and how overexplicitness might…

Thirty-six fourth grade pupils were grouped according to reading ability in a study conducted to examine comprehension within the framework of event perception. The children were presented a sequential activity described in picture or text form and then were asked to indicate on scoring sheets which of eight test items logically fit with the event…

Many factors influence the comprehension of a linguistic act by a listener or reader. Some, such as maturity, background, and interests of the decoder are nonlinguistic; others, such as the vocabulary and complexity of the morphological and syntactical structures are linguistic in nature. A review of the literature reveals that while studies have…

This paper provides a general description of schema-theoretic models of language comprehension and examines some extensions of such models to the study of reading. The goal of schema theory is to specify the interface between the reader and the text: to specify how the reader's knowledge interacts with and shapes the information on the page and to…

The perception of proximal relationships (directly stated in a sentence) or remote relationships (requiring sentences to be combined) in reading materials was studied to see whether children have the same difficulties in detecting the relationships as do adults. The subjects were 22 children from grades 2, 4, and 5 who were given stories to read…

In this report data are presented that challenge the difficulty ordering for anaphoric syntax (e. g., pronouns) proposed by Bormuth, Manning, Carr, and Pearson in 1970. It is suggested that any such difficulty ordering resulting from tests of the form proposed by Bormuth (1970) will have uncontrolled variability due to semantic factors that have…

this publication is the second in the Research-Based Practices in Early Reading Series published by the Regional Educational Laboratory at Pacific Resources for Education and Learning. Of the many compelling reasons for providing students with instruction to build vocabulary, none is more important than the contribution of vocabulary knowledge…

Reviews experiments designed to determine whether pictures have an effect upon the derivation of meaning from the text printed in children's reading materials and notes ways that pictures support and possibly interfere with meaning. (MKM)

The comprehension of a narrative passage by primary grade children as a function of both listening rate and the reading comprehension level was examined by this study. Ninety-six children divided into three groups according to reading level were used. The listening rate was controlled by means of a word compression ranging from zero (138 words per…