Children who have difficulty reading content materials are sometimes found to read fiction quite well. These children may not have the conceptual knowledge they need to relate the text material to their own lives. Children may experience difficulty reading content texts because they do not actively try to relate to and build knowledge from one…

Techniques and approaches useful for developing reading comprehension and reading skills in second language learners are discussed and illustrated with examples from German. Literature is reviewed on: the effectiveness of reading while listening, transfer of skills and knowledge from one language to another, the role of guessing in reading…

Representing a first attempt by English teachers in Scotland to address a professional mandate that they teach and assess the modes of talking and listening, this booklet outlines both the scope and the details of an oral/aural syllabus. The eight chapters in the booklet cover the following areas: (1) the oral syllabus--principles and approaches;…

Instructional materials for advanced Sanaani Arabic, a dialect used predominantly for oral communication, include 25 units consisting of text derived from recordings of spontaneous conversations of native speakers in various communication situations. Some of the topics are: medical services, marriage, jobs, an interview, a car accident, proverbs…

A study investigating the influence of certain features of cohesion and coherence on Israeli college students' difficulty in reading English expository texts examined the reader's ability to understand sequences of propositions and familiarity with markers of cohesion. Three methods were used to investigate the problem: application of a…

Systematic but unanticipated differences in patterns of responses to a test between two or more groups is generally taken as evidence of test bias. This study assessed whether a carefully-targeted instructional sequence could influence the effects of bias. A reading comprehension test with items previously identified as biased for certain groups…

Papers delivered at the second American Reading Forum are collected in this yearbook. While all of the essays focus on the theme of reading in the disciplines, many of them respond to a preceding essay. The essays and reactions cover a variety of topics, including the following: (1) a qualitative analysis of reading instruction in low level…

Because thematic statements are too global to aid poor readers in comprehending texts, a series of studies using a common procedure was conducted to determine the relationship between teaching thematic concepts prior to reading and reading comprehension. The thematic organizers used in the studies contained three paragraphs that defined the…

The papers in this collection represent a wide spectrum of approaches, philosophies, and viewpoints of scholarly endeavor in their treatment of reading theories, research, and processes. The collection begins with an address by the president of the National Reading Conference concerning the tools for reading researchers. The remaining 53 articles…

Ideas of educational psycholinguists Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman can be combined with the ideas presented in current basal reader manuals to help teachers teach reading more effectively. Since reading and speaking are parallel processes, teachers may invite children to "read" with them, hearing the melody of language as they point to…

Many adult poor readers do not organize what they read in a way that best facilitates good comprehension. To help students overcome this problem, the Adult Day and Evening School in Oakland, California, organized a reading laboratory for their mostly low-income, educationally disadvantaged students with a diverse range of needs. Instruction in the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) creativity as a mediating variable in inferential reading comprehension; (2) teacher questioning and student response interaction during portions of reading…

These proceedings of the 1976 Georgetown Round Table are divided into four sections that deal with: (1) synchronic and diachronic aspects of semantics; (2) semantics and linguistics; (3) semantics and other disciplines; and (4) semantics and teaching methods. More specifically the papers treat: the semantic interpretation of anaphoric expressions;…

The "Test Development Notebook" is a resource designed for the preparation of tests of literal comprehension for students in grades 1 through 12. This volume contains 200 multiple-choice cloze exercises taken from language arts textbooks, and the accompanying answer key. Each exercise carries the code letter of the section to which it belongs. The…

The "Test Development Notebook" is a resource designed for the preparation of tests of literal comprehension for students in grades 1 through 12. This volume contains 260 multiple-choice cloze exercises taken from textbooks in social studies, and the accompanying answer key. Each exercise carries the code letter of the section to which it belongs.…