Current theory posits that comprehension and meaning involve not only text but also what the reader brings to the text and the contextual elements of the reading. A study investigated how eight students in grade 9 read and created meaning from short story assignments in their English classrooms. Concurrent think-aloud protocols from four short…

The purpose of this research was to determine whether a computer assisted instruction (CAI) program increased the reading and math standardized test scores for selected sixth grade high risk students in a rural school district. Fifty-four randomly selected students' scores on the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT) Series were compared before and…

One of a series of semi-annual reports, this publication contains 25 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles are as follows: "Acoustic Shards, Perceptual Glue" (Robert E. Remez and Philip E. Rubin); "F0 Gives Voicing…

This study explored the enhancement of comprehension of expository text by three specific types of embedded explication--etymological, causal, and analogical--together with momentum effects from sequencing. Four factors were examined: (1) the experimental effects of presenting the section of the script containing explications of new terms before…

A study examined the effects of prediction training on the reading comprehension and written composition performance of fourth-grade students on the following reading and writing tasks: story recall, story generation, and number of relevant predictions. Subjects, 40 students attending two private urban elementary schools, were assigned to one of…

This bulletin was founded at the eleventh World Congress on Reading, held in London in 1986. Its subject is Literacy Education in Asia and its objective is to "enable different National Councils to share information about literacy in their own region and how problems are met." (WTB) (Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse on Literacy Education)

In the course of a longitudinal study that addressed the questions of how children learn to comprehend what they read and how they learn science concepts, many other research questions emerged. The original longitudinal study investigated how children learn to comprehend what they read. Three school districts with fairly stable student…

A large segment of poor readers in elementary school do not supply prosodic features to print; in other words, they do not use pauses, changes in pitch, or differences in emphasis to show their comprehension. Two methods that help children to supply reading intonation involve using phrasally segmented texts and teacher modeling of the correct…

To investigate the higher level comprehension strategies used by children reading basal reader stories, a study compared the results of an earlier investigation of 50 fourth grade level readers' comprehension strategies with findings gained from 30 subjects using a sixth grade basal reader. Subjects were asked to read aloud from a basal and stop…

Research data in neurosurgery, neuropsychology, and neurolinguistics indicate that the human brain is lateralized toward one of two methods of information processing, and that, in most humans, the language bias appears to be a left hemisphere function, while the visiospatial bias belongs to the right. Furthermore, the left hemisphere seems to…

To determine if able and disabled college student readers can be distinguished by their awareness and use of metacognitive and cognitive strategies, 36 freshmen students enrolled in a reading and study skills class were classified as either good or poor readers based on their Nelson-Denny Reading Test scores. After reading five short passages and…

A study examined the effects of sex-typed content and sex role preference on 87 fifth grade boys' and 64 fifth grade girls' reading material preferences. It also explored how high- and low-rated sex-typed reading content and students' sex and sex role preferences influenced reading comprehension. After reading the sex-typed content, which…

After reviewing criticisms of the exclusive use of readability formulas to evaluate text difficulty and describing successful efforts to broaden the traditional readability formula approach, this report presents a 20 item checklist for determining text comprehensibility based on four criteria: (1) specific objectives or outcomes expected from the…

A study examined the effect of five types of sentence faults on the method of information processing, recall ability, confidence rating, and comprehensibility rating of college freshman English students. The control text consisted of five passages and the accompanying comprehension questions exactly as they appear on the multiple choice Georgia…

A study investigated whether direct instruction in story constituents and their interrelationships could enhance children's organization in story writing. It was hypothesized that the special instruction could provide children with an internalized prototype story structure that could serve as a heuristic or planning device for organizing…