In April 1969, the year before school district reorganization, students in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania were given the 1965 version of the Stanford Achievement Test. In April 1976, the sixth year of desegregation, students were given the 1973 version of the Stanford Achievement Test. This paper presents seven charts comparing the 1969 scores in…

This paper discusses a study designed to evaluate the use of semantic and syntactic expectations in reading. Sixteen college-student subjects, measured for reading proficiency by the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, were divided equally into a fast-reading group (350-450 words per minute) and an average-speed reading group (200-275 words per minute).…

Twenty-one students in their second quarter of Romanian language study at The Ohio State University completed a language background survey, took a perception test and made a tape recording of their pronunciations of a list of Romanian words. The tape used in the perception test consisted of a list of fifteen minimal pairs with initial voiceless or…

The National Institute of Education (NIE) Conference on Studies in Reading, held in 1974, featured ten panel discussions, each focusing on a designated topic related to reading. This publication reviews the reports of recommended research and development activities produced by the panels for the following topical areas: semantics, concepts, and…

This book provides secondary reading teachers with a practical guide for establishing a reading laboratory program. Written in conversational style, it contains diary-like comments and includes student responses to the activities described. The first section deals with the following topics: determining the physical aspects of a reading laboratory,…

Language processing is the abstraction of meaning from a physical signal, such as a sequence of speech sounds. Processing a spoken message requires a series of transformations that begin with the acoustic signal arriving at the ears and end with meaning in the mind of the listener. The goal of this information-processing model is to describe how…

The ability of foreign students to read non-scientific material efficiently is important for rapid social and cultural integration. This report describes the reading comprehension section of a French language course aimed at foreign students at the Nancy Science Faculty. Exercises are presented which cover morpho-syntactic, communicative and…

Self talk (thoughts about one's self and own performance while learning or working) can affect cognitive and learning strategies that in turn affect specific learning techniques. Negative self talk can interfere with learning since it reinforces feelings of failure, thereby increasing the probability of continued failure, and maintains an…

The rationale, development, and implementation of a reading program designed to teach disadvantaged children the skills prerequisite to learning to read are discussed in this paper. Of particular importance are skills in the recognition and manipulation of basic speech sounds, phonemes. The first of the program's three parts takes two and one-half…

This evaluation report is a description of the Brandeis High School Bilingual Program in its third year of operation. The program was funded under the Elementary Secondary Education Act Title VII. Four hundred eighty-five students who were in need of remedial work in English and/or speech were enrolled in the program. The main language in the home…

A three-year study was conducted at a California junior college to determine the number of college freshmen who needed assistance/counseling in reading achievement. In the first phase of the study (1974-1975), all entering freshmen were administered the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, Form C. The same instrument was used during the second phase of the…

To determine whether students gain more knowledge and stronger impressions from reading a play or from viewing the play on videotape, two groups of college students were presented with an excerpt from Arthur Miller's "Incident at Vichy." One group was to read the excerpt and the other group was to view the same excerpt from a public…

Two experiments examined the effects of definition and synonym as context clues embedded in three types of text (fiction, exposition, and science). It was predicted that (1) type of text would influence clue usage; (2) difficulty of the text, based on increasingly more detailed complex information, would interfere with the use of clues; (3) clue…

In learning to read a nonnative language, the learner's ability to achieve meaning is hampered if adequate preparation or readiness for reading is neglected. A review of the literature pertaining to second language learning and reading in a second language has identified five principles that appear to be significant in providing effective reading…

The many studies comparing good and poor readers have yielded few conclusive findings as a result of a number of problems. The first set of problems has to do with the choice of tests or tasks. There are many differences in the cognitive demands of reading and listening tasks children encounter in school. In listening, prosodic cues facilitate…