Answers of undergraduate Brazilian English as a foreign language students (N=40) to an open-ended and a multiple-choice reading comprehension test revealed that three prereading activities (pictorial context, vocabulary preteaching, and prequestioning) resulted in higher reading comprehension. (Author/CB)

Examines developmental changes in children's ability to comprehend visual and verbal narrative. Finds that understanding and integrating temporal aspects of a narrative is more difficult for young children when the story is presented visually than when presented verbally, whereas older children comprehend narratives in both formats equally well.…

More than 1,500 high school foreign language students were tested for comprehension of authentic texts. First- through fifth-year French, German, and Spanish students read texts of the types mentioned in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines at the intermediate and intermediate high levels. All students captured some meaning from each of the texts.…

Describes various activities designed for use in the reading classroom, including (1) cooperative learning activities; (2) reading and writing activities; (3) ways to improve comprehension; and (4) ways to encourage independent reading. (FL)

Investigates the relationship of out-of-school activities to reading achievement. Finds a wide variation between children in amount of out-of-school reading. Concludes that reading books was the out-of-school activity that had the strongest association with reading proficiency, but that on most days most subjects did little or no book reading. (MM)

Indicates that use of two microcomputer word recognition programs led to substantial increases in word recognition/decoding skills and to substantial improvements in comprehension at the word and proposition/sentence level, but to no improvement at the passage level. (NKA)

Suggests that, in the majority of the aspects of the reading process examined, there was a statistically significant interaction between illustration and difficulty levels. Finds that reading performance in the illustrated conditions was superior to that in the unillustrated conditions at the lower level of difficulty. (JD)

Analysis of responses to two cloze tests administered to native and non-native speakers of English revealed that non-natives were far less capable of coping with the loss of redundant cohesive data than were natives. Nonnatives were more reliant on text in comprehension process than were native speakers. (Author/CB)

Explains how to ask questions that will help students focus on structure and better understand expository text. Notes that because students must make both internal and external connections to text structure, teachers should ask questions which prompt students to identify the relationships among ideas in a text so that meaningful learning can…

Presents a decision model for planning learner feedback in distance education courses with emphasis on college-level teaching. Knowledge components in information processing models of learning are described, task analysis for learning from text is discussed in terms of comprehension, and criteria for designing learner feedback are examined. (LRW)

Examines evidence on error rate in classroom tasks. Claims the usual interpretation of a negative relationship between error rate (especially in oral reading errors) and reading achievement as meaning that low error rates lead to reading growth may be mistaken. Suggests oral errors cause tension, which increases attention and instigates deeper…

Observation of native Hebrew speakers who read Hebrew and English texts suggested that there is a powerful affective factor which completely blocks the reading in English of some students and severely limits the comprehension of a considerable number of others when they meet difficulties in the foreign language texts. (Author/CB)

This study examined the degree to which student performance in constructing macrostructures in Chinese prose is affected by three text features: number of ideas, metaphoric expressions and advance organizer. Results showed that fewer ideas facilitated macroprocessing, metaphors did not influence idea organization, and advance organizer resulted in…

Reports findings of a study involving adult, college-educated Egyptians enrolled in English as a second language courses in Cairo. Concludes that students learning to read in a second language interpret materials in terms of their own culture, which affects their comprehension. (FL)

Argues that sufficient adaptivity in computer-assisted language learning materials for individual study can be achieved only if such programs are able to perform meaningful error analysis and fit the needs of individual learners. Other effective elements of the program include collecting information on learning and performance histories of…