Reading texts may serve as a vital source of informational content and language knowledge for second language (L2) learners, which is known as the dual relevance of L2 reading (Han & D'Angelo, 2009). Text complexity, however, influences the two, determining to a great extent whether the dual outcome is attainable. Drawing on Complex Dynamic…

Explores factors that influence readability and a reader's ability to process information. (TO)

Procedures and findings of three reading comprehension studies are reported. The first study compared cloze readability test scores for 130 pairs of students (grade 3 through college) with scores indicating the information gained from reading. Students gained little or no information when they could not answer more than 25 percent of the cloze…

Some 2700 Belgian students (grades five through twelve) participated in this study of the relationships between linguistic features of passages and passage readability estimated from cloze procedures. Clozed versions of each of 60 test passages were prepared and administered to students at various grade levels. Twenty-five linguistic features of…

An investigation of the relationships between form and comprehension of written materials by eleventh grade students is reported in this paper. Students were asked to manipulate two variables of spacing and punctuation in a consistently administered and marked exercise. Students also completed a comprehension test on the exercise they had just…

Student editorials and letters to the editor that appeared in selected school newspapers during two school years (1949-1950 and 1973-1974) were analyzed to determine whether the more recent writing revealed characteristics usually associated with oral expression, a hypothetically negative influence of television viewing. In the analysis, only five…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 29 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: various factors in terms of attitudes toward reading; the effect of group counseling on self-concept and reading achievement; the effect of three modes of…