To encourage reluctant readers, teachers can use a technique called "read a book in an hour." Students are assigned individual chapters of a paperback novel to read silently. After they have finished reading, they retell the significant chapter events, state the conflicts, and identify the characters as the teacher records the…

Comprehension is a process that occurs within the reader and is at least partially dependent on cohesion and coherence. The concept of cohesion is used to show how sentences which are structurally independent of one another may be linked together. Cohesion exists within a text and is not the same as coherence, which is something the reader…

Extensive research has proven that the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain tend to be qualitatively different. The left hemisphere, which for most people is dominant, is the major controller of speech, reading, and writing; it is the hemisphere toward which education traditionally has been directed. The right hemisphere excels in…

The cloze test requires a student to fill gaps in a text with appropriate words where every nth word is deleted. The cloze procedure forms a test of a reader's ability to predict, on the basis of context, what word will occur. Test marking may be narrow, in which only the exact word omitted is counted as correct, or broad, where any acceptable…

Successful reading is a complex, interactive process in which the reader's experience and information are as important to comprehension as the content of the printed page. This article describes several reading processes, discusses the problems involved for the beginning reader, and indicates some implications for reading instruction. Five…

The articles in this journal for reading teachers stress the importance of comprehension in the reading process. The topics discussed include the following: inferences and comprehension, the learning process involved in comprehension, the gifted student and reading comprehension, the cloze procedure, language clues to reading comprehension,…

Children's expectations regarding the roles played in society by different groups of people have been shown to significantly affect their comprehension of sentences. This paper reports on a study designed to examine the way children's expectations affect the strategies they employ in two tasks tapping the organization of the semantic system. Sixty…

Compressed speech tapes--recordings of a voice reading a selection at the normal rate of approximately 150 words per minute that are speeded up to as much as 400 words a minute--can be used successfully with students to provide practice in improving reading rate and comprehension. In a field test conducted with 23 high school juniors and seniors…

This paper reports the outcomes of a correlational study that examined the relationships between visual and auditory perceptual skills, on the one hand, and comprehension that is independent of decoding, on the other. Five sets of test scores--a visual perceptual test (Coloured Progressive Matrices), an auditory perceptual test (Auditory Motor…

This study was designed to discover the answers to two general questions concerning the instrucitonal level of reading: (1) What is the percentage of word recognition that is necessary for second and fifth graders to maintain in order to achieve a certain percentage of comprehension? (2) Are those word recognition percentages the same for both…

This study was designed to test the effects of choice on the reading comprehension of 92 fifth and sixth grade students. Conducted in an elementary classroom, the test involved having each student read five cloze passages and answer an interest questionnaire about the passages. The experimental variable in this study was choice of topics on a…

A 30 hour remedial reading workshop, designed for all secondary language arts teachers and for selected secondary teachers in all subject areas, is described in this report. The workshop was designed for teachers in the Pamlico County (North Carolina) Schools by members of that school system and the General Assistance Center at East Carolina…

This study questions the developmental nature of the ability to understand syntactic structures. An exploration is made of the possibility of learning more about reading comprehension and readability by examining responses made to sentences described by transformational grammarians as structurally ambiguous. A group of fifth grade students were…

Two passages were written, one on the topic of graphs and one on the topic of sonnets. Sixteen versions of each passage were constructed. Each version contained identical content but different textual manipulations. One hundred twelve community college students and 48 Cornell students participated in the experiment. Each read a single version of…

In order to determine the opinions of third grade remedial reading pupils about trade books recommended in library selection aids and special series books recommended for poor readers, 57 pupils completed statements on book inventory forms about 24 picture books and 24 series books. Data was gathered on book completion, interest, and difficulty…