Four language class activities are suggested, including an exercise designed to involve even the most recalcitrant students in oral communication, an artist's visit to the class to discuss his work, use of an authentic document to develop understanding of figurative language, and a reading comprehension and interpretation activity. (MSE)

Describes study that was conducted to determine the effects of two electronic text variables used in desktop publishing on undergraduate students' reading speed and comprehension. Research on text variables, graphic design, instructional text design, and computer screen design is discussed, and further studies are suggested. (22 references) (LRW)

The effectiveness of the Program for Fostering of Reading and Thinking for disadvantaged adolescents in Israel was assessed during a controlled study using 133 eighth and ninth graders. The study assessed verbal reasoning exercises, special training effects, and various types of texts and cognitive operations. (TJH)

Examines comprehension of sentences with multiple negations among 71 monolingual Anglo and bilingual Hispanic undergraduate science and engineering majors. Finds that both groups misused rules of logic and natural discourse; similar groups benefited from training to eliminate inappropriate reasoning strategies, but only Anglos retained the…

Makes use of natural language of the beginning reader to teach a unit on dinosaurs. Outlines steps in the approach, strategies to heighten awareness and application, questions for encouraging further study, and a webbing technique. (RT)

Reports a longitudinal case study of preschoolers' unprompted questions during story reading with their parents. Reports that children ask more questions about pictures and story meaning than about word meaning and graphic forms. Concludes that home reading may affect comprehension more than print awareness. (RS/JAD)

Describes a Brazilian university's first semester English for Special Purposes class for library science students. An outline of guidelines is presented for designing instructional materials for a second semester library science course focusing on the application of text comprehension skills, learned during the first semester, to summarizing and…

Deaf children need reading programs which emphasize comprehension of meaning rather than syntax and grammar. Successful reading programs can emerge when reading is viewed as a highly social experience, reading materials are meaningful and highly contextualized, and semantic processing in American Sign Language is used to assist reading in English.…

Compares student performances when reading printed text and text on a microcomputer screen. Reports that students have more difficulty locating information on-screen than in-print, particularly within prose passages. (MG)

Reviews the research that led to the movement toward literature based reading programs for children and describes the current status of the movement nationally. The discussion also addresses problems within the movement, including program evaluation; basalization of literature; cumbersome literature guides; acquisition difficulties; inadequate…

The findings from research on written and oral summarization are discussed under three headings: summarizers' strategies, improving summarizers' performance, and the assessment of summary quality. Objective measures of summary quality used by researchers are described, and ways these measures could be adapted for use in higher education assessment…

An exploratory analysis comparing two test batteries for English-as-a-Foreign-Language reading comprehension used a single framework of communicative language ability and test method facets to investigate construct validity. The framework's use in the content analysis of communicative language tests, and for the comparison of content across tests,…

A semantic mapping heuristic is presented which provides an instructional strategy for teaching notetaking, recognizing main ideas and pertinent details, and sorting and organizing them into a report. The strategy enables learning-disabled students to read independently about a topic and subsequently write a report, thus establishing a…

Seventh- and eighth-grade students with learning disabilities (n=29) who reasoned through factual prose sentences did not recall more information than students who were prompted to try to remember the content after each sentence. However, students trained in thinking skills produced more correct explanations of the information than control…

This discussion of fostering recall and developing reasoning processes in students with mild disabilities considers the role of mnemonic strategies, similarities between mnemonic strategies and elaborative interrogation to facilitate information retrieval, constructivism and elaborative interrogation, and such problems as generalization and…