Three studies were conducted to test the effectiveness of reciprocal teaching as a means of instructing seventh grade poor readers about activities they could use to increase comprehension and to ascertain that their comprehension was proceeding smoothly (comprehension monitoring). Reciprocal teaching involves having teacher and students take…

While listening comprehension is perhaps the most ignored area of the language arts, a review of the literature suggests that it is deserving of more classroom instructional time. Involving the simultaneous orchestration of skills in phonology, syntax, semantics, and knowledge of text structure, listening comprehension seems to be controlled by…

Basic Achievement Skills Individual Screener (BASIS) was designed by the Psychological Corporation to yield criterion-referenced information as well as normative scores. The constraints imposed by this dual purpose were increased by the requirements inherent in an individually-administered format and the short testing time consistent with test use…

This handbook was developed to help secondary school physical education teachers to encourage and promote reading in their programs. Guidelines and suggestions are offered on ways teachers can stimulate student reading by capitalizing upon interest in sport, and on ways teachers can reinforce vocabulary and comprehension skills. An introduction…

This primer was developed to help secondary school foreign language teachers to encourage and promote reading in their curricular programs. Guidelines and suggestions are offered on ways teachers can stimulate student reading by capitalizing on student interests and on ways teachers can reinforce vocabulary and comprehension skills. The manual's…

The "Test Development Notebook" is a resource designed for the preparation of tests of literal comprehension for students in grades 1 through 12. This volume contains 425 multiple-choice cloze exercises taken from textbooks in reading and literature, and the accompanying answer key. Each exercise carries the code letter of the section to which it…

Testwiseness (TW) and its effect on the reading comprehension scores in four ethnic populations (Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Anglo) from the Tucson Unified School District were investigated. Inservice-trained teachers presented seven classroom TW teaching and practicing sessions of 15 minutes each to students in grades 3, 5, and 7.…

The research and practical questions about the internal lexicon, the associated network of internal representation basic to word meaning, boil down to whether in reading English the phonological route is obligatory or optional. Since the English writing system is morphophonemic, not phonetic, access to the internal lexicon cannot and should not…

A study was conducted to examine learning from textbook sentences that provide examples. It was predicted that an example written succinctly and with a word order that emphasized its parallel semantic relations with the exemplified principle, such as "animals have parasites; dogs have fleas," would have a positive effect on idea comprehension. It…

A test battery termed "Assessment of Reading and Language Maturity" (ALARM) contains 15 subtests designed to cover the major and minor elements involved in assessing and promoting progress toward reading-language-thinking and social-emotional maturity. Although still undergoing development, ALARM has been administered to and partially…

Computer-based reading programs have been used at the City Educational Clinic in Canberra, Australia, to improve the reading skills of children who are "reading disabled." Children interacted with the computer via a graphic display, touch sensitive screen, and synthesized speech. The first program taught a basic sight vocabulary and…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 9 titles discuss the following topics: (1) a comparison of the effects of three methods of vocabulary instruction on vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension; (2) the use of an elaboration strategy combined with classroom…

Drawn from a conference that addressed the role of sentence combining in the teaching of writing, the papers in this collection are divided into three sections: the theory of sentence combining, research in sentence combining, and sentence combining in the classroom. The 22 papers discuss a variety of topics, including the following: (1) sentence…

Successive studies conducted in Sweden have shown that linguistic awareness is an important prerequisite of learning to read. In one survey that measured the various aspects of the linguistic awareness of 6-year-old children, a very close connection was found between preschool linguistic awareness and reading proficiency in school. Another study…

Using an effort toward comprehension paradigm developed by P. M. Auble, J. J. Franks, and S. A. Soraci, Jr. (1979), the worry component of state test anxiety was related to long-term memory for sentence encoding conditions that involved comprehension, but low effort (embedded-cue) and comprehension-high effort (post-cue). A noncomprehension…