A study was conducted to determine what beliefs secondary school students held about reading and to compare those beliefs with a set of elementary school teachers' beliefs identified by G. Duffy and W. Metheny. Three hundred high school students from freshman, junior, and senior social studies classes completed a revised version of the 45-item…

Using informal, objectives-based, or linguistic methods, three elementary school teachers and three experienced item writers developed criterion-referenced pretests-posttests to accompany a prose passage. Item difficulites were tabulated on the responses of 364 elementary students. The informal-subjective method, used by many achievement test…

Ability to reason clearly and efficiently is perhaps the single most important learning objective common to all subjects and to all aspects of the schooling situation. In order to design an effective reading comprehension program, teachers and program planners must assess children's logical abilities. This discussion provides a review of some of…

The bulk of this guide is devoted to the detailed description of 18 tests of English as a second language (ESL). Most of the tests were produced in Great Britain, the remainder in the United States. Each description provides information on the source, aims, and administration of the test; outlines the content of the test; and, where pertinent,…

This introduction to the pedagogy of reading comprehension in a second language focuses on learning strategies appropriate to achieving reading competence. Lexical strategies can be fostered by tolerating local errors and encouraging practice in the identification of specific features such as tense, part of speech, and cognation. Tasks that…

Focusing on helping teachers to understand and help children who have reading disabilities, the 13 papers in this volume were prepared by practitioners at various levels from public school, community, and university settings. The papers included in part one offer insights into the concomitant aspects of reading difficulties. Specific topics…

Compressed speech (speed listening), in which audiotapes are speeded up, is examined in this paper along with its relationship to the reading process. Among the topics discussed first are the close relationship between reading and listening, the rationale behind compressed speech, and the use of compressed speech in business communication, special…

A peer tutoring program was implemented in a nongraded innercity school in an effort to decrease discipline problems--specifically fighting--and to increase the reading comprehension of both tutors and tutees. The target group consisted of 25 intermediate and junior high school students who tutored 25 intermediate and primary school students. The…

Six articles are presented in this special interest journal focusing on two-year college reading instruction. Mindy Brooks discusses teaching and learning styles in terms of individual approaches to gathering and evaluating data. W. E. Jackson and Twalah Jackson discuss changes in the educational environment as related to the concept of "getting…

The story recall abilities of 26 dyslexic children were tested, using a story schema representation previously used in research with normal children. Comparisons within the disabled reader group found significant differences in story schema knowledge, but comparisons between normal and disabled readers revealed no significant differences. However,…

This report provides a detailed account of a three-year project that sought to determine how average and above average ten- and fifteen-year-old readers in Great Britain actually used reading in school. The 11 chapters cover the following topics: the origins, background, and development of the project; the differences between spoken and written…

This volume contains a series of stories and related questions about famous graduates of Boys and Girls High School and about some high points in the school's 100 year history. Brief biographical sketches are provided for Shirley Chisholm, Isaac Asimov, and other individuals who graduated from the school. Other readings describe various aspects of…

Differences in 164 fifth grade students' reading comprehension scores were obtained with four different tasks typically used to measure comprehension (multiple choice, recall, cloze, and maze), using four different reading passages that were equated according to readability formulas. Data analyses revealed significant effects for passage, task,…

The inservice teacher education course described is designed for special education teachers of reading at the elementary level. The contents and scope of the module are outlined, and the activities and resources involved in the use of the materials are described. Ordering information is included and a critique of the unit is provided. (JD)

Three paradigms for assessing children's vocabulary knowledge were evaluated in this study: synonym, synonym in context, and cloze. The vocabulary tests, a paper-and-pencil adaptation of the on-line tests used in two previous studies, were administered to 830 second through seventh grade students. Subjects performed similarly on the three formats…