Focusing on the ways in which skilled readers detect ironic subtexts in nonfiction prose, a study examined strategies used by readers to infer writers' aims in ironic discourse and compared these strategies with those revealed by other recent reading process studies. Subjects, six graduate students and five college freshmen, were asked to read…

In a study designed to further define individual differences in reading comprehension, 200 students enrolled in developmental reading courses at a large urban university participated in an experiment that investigated the relationship between personality type and reading comprehension. The students took a reading comprehension test consisting of…

In response to teachers' requests for specific information about implementing the curriculum in the Expository Writing Program (EWP), this manual presents the instructional methods and materials used during the Teaching Expository Reading and Writing Project. First, the lines of research that formed the basis for the instructional program are…

A study examined whether writing instruction focusing on organizational patterns has a significant effect on reading comprehension. Writing samples were obtained from 18 second graders, nine of whom received no instruction, while the other nine received instruction on the purpose and use of the topic sentence, adding details to the topic, and…

To be effective learners, students should know about the state or level of their learning and the success of the strategies they are using, so that when they misunderstand a concept they can do additional reading or consult outside sources. Traditionally, textbook study has been taught through the use of so-called formula techniques, where the…

The Flesch readability index yields meaningful information about the responses of readers to texts. Because the formula is so simple, a group of English teachers wrote a program in BASIC that would count some obvious surface features of a text and calculate Flesch scores. Among the programing problems encountered were counting words (taking into…

A study compared and evaluated alternative theoretical models of the relationship of learning to read and learning to write at beginning and advanced levels of reading development. The reading dimensions of the three models included word analysis, vocabulary, and sentence and passage comprehension components. The writing dimensions included…

A study was conducted to apply what is known about how expository text structure variables enhance main idea comprehension and to determine if restructuring content textbook passages improves such comprehension. Original texts were rewritten to be more "considerate" as follows: the paragraph main ideas were rewritten and placed in the…

College students can read, but they often lack the prereading and postreading skills needed to help them think about and respond to what they read. A three-step plan can help students read and understand the text more fully. The first step entails using measures of fitness to determine: (1) the grade level of the text being considered and how it…

The information in this guide is arranged to provide Title I reading teachers with (1) a list of materials that are coordinated with the performance objectives forming the core of the educational program for Title I students, and (2) suggested teaching strategies for each performance objective. Content of the guide is divided into the following…

Students who have the necessary computational skills can solve word problems in mathematics only if they can comprehend the language of the problem. In order to best teach reading comprehension of mathematical word problems, teachers should consider the following steps: (1) prepare for teaching a problem by analyzing the ways the problem can be…

Recent advances in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and information processing theory have produced several notions that have revolutionized previous conceptions of reading and what it means to understand. These notions support the idea that more emphasis should be placed on reading comprehension skills in the English as a second language…

One of a series dealing with current issues affecting language arts instruction, this paper focuses on the conceptions and misconceptions of readability. The paper begins by noting that over the years, researchers in readability have had two major goals: to determine what makes written materials easy or difficult to read and comprehend, and to…

Most studies of eye movement behavior during reading have dealt with the processes involved with local aspects of text, such as visual or graphic characteristics or individual word features. To determine if a global level of processing (pertaining to the whole text or to large sections of it) would affect eye movement patterns differently, a study…

In an effort to assess community college students' knowledge of the liberal arts, the Center for the Study of Community Colleges developed and field-tested a student survey and General Academic Assessment (GAA) instrument. The GAA was completed by a sample of 8,024 students at four large, urban community college districts. The scores were cross…