A teacher describes the use of closed-caption decoding of television melodramas to teach English as a second language (ESL). The approach uses evening soap operas that afford a range of English usage and accents, realistic dialogue, entertainment, and coverage of current social issues and are closed-captioned for the hearing-impaired. The programs…

This investigation--the first Dutch longitudinal research project on reading and spelling spanning the whole 6-year period of primary education--examined (1) whether it is possible to identify certain aspects of literacy--namely decoding skills, reading comprehension, and spelling skills--within verbal intelligence as latent variables, and…

Presented in this curriculum guide are materials for eighth grade United States history instruction suitable for students of English as a second language. The guide contains three sections on early American history covering the period of discovery and exploration, the colonies in North America, and the American Revolution. Each section contains…

Intended for use mainly by secondary school teachers of students with low reading achievement, the Reading to Learn (RTL) model provides the teacher with a way to assess, prescribe, adjust for individual differences, and develop reading skills while teaching content. An informal screening test (IST), the first step, determines which students are…

Intended for both teachers and students, this bulletin presents specific information about the design, parts, and scoring of the Grade 9 English Language Arts Achievement Test for the 1985-86 school year in Alberta, Canada. General information is presented regarding the (1) purpose and nature of the Achievement Testing Program (ATP), (2) students…

Doubts about the reading vocabulary adequacies of today's high school graduates led to an experiment with a list of 199 difficult words culled from the "Reader's Digest." College juniors and seniors (298 in the first stage and 388 in the second stage) were asked to indicate whether they knew the pronunciation and the meaning of the…

Cosponsored by Hanyang University as a demonstration of its founding philosophy, "love in deed and truth," this conference focused on literacy and languages from cross-cultural and instructional perspectives. The papers selected for this yearbook and their authors are as follows: (1) "Designing Tasks for Slow Learners in L2"…

The results of a three-part study, conducted to present an indepth look at reading comprehension instruction in the middle grades, are described in this report. Four major areas are covered: teacher's verbal reports, program specifications, teaching behavior, and student mastery. The report first describes the research design, or how a profile of…

A three-part study was conducted to present an indepth look at reading comprehension instruction in the middle grades. In the first part of the study, four basal series for grades 4, 5, and 6, were analyzed for clarity of communication, adequacy of skill practice provided, and a number of other comprehension related dimensions. In the second part,…

Vocational educators need to build bridges for student's transition into and success through the vocational program of their reasoned choice by communicating and cooperating with developmental education instructors. The major focus of the role of the vocational instructor in working with the developmental educator concerns assessment of students…

Reading comprehension skills can be taught effectively across the curriculum leading to enhanced critical thinking and reading skills, as well as improved performance in content areas. Skilled readers plan their approach to the task at hand, monitor their learning as they read, apply strategies to foster learning, evaluate, and if necessary,…

Part of the Alberta (Canada) Education's "Program of Studies for Elementary Schools, 1978" (amended 1981), this publication presents the curriculum specifications for the grade six language arts achievement test. These curriculum specifications integrate a taxonomy of levels of thinking skills with a set of five communications…

The design and development of a test of inference ability in reading comprehension for grades 6, 7, and 8 (the Phillips-Patterson Test of Inference Ability in Reading Comprehension) are described. After development of a contemporary theoretical framework for the test of inference ability in reading comprehension, the design, item development, and…

An outline of the Spanish curriculum used in grades 4-7 in the Radford, Virginia schools is presented. It consists of outlines of the course content for each year of the four-year program. The content is divided into two categories: listening comprehension, geared to a specific textbook, and the grouped skills of speaking, reading, writing,…

A study investigated whether semantic feature analysis (SFA) significantly improves the content related vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension of adolescent, learning disabled readers. SFA is a set of vocabulary development activities designed to help students categorize vocabulary words and compare related ideas. Subjects, 62 learning…