This guide is designed to offer interesting, authentic practice in reading college-level technical textbooks and periodical articles. The book contains actual reading assignments and strategies to help students improve comprehension and to develop metacognitive insight into their own reading processes. The guide is presented in three levels, each…

A study examined the effects of an integrated reading/writing curriculum on the narrative writing of students in general education eighth-grade classrooms. Subjects, 93 students (including 10 with learning disabilities) from middle to upper-middle socioeconomic backgrounds at a suburban middle school in western Oregon, were administered narrative…

Reciprocal teaching, a method of teaching first language reading comprehension, is explained and three distinct applications of the method and materials in second language instruction are described. Reciprocal teaching is viewed as a three-level hierarchy of components and strategies, reflected in the organization of materials and activities. The…

At the Louisiana State University Laboratory School, the 4-year course sequences in French and Spanish use American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) proficiency guidelines as a basis for planning for language skill development. In listening proficiency, the course sequence integrates teaching of listening skills with other…

This paper reports on a study which used a new model, the Cluster Analytic Model (CAM), to determine the relationship between college coursework and general learning, as determined by the nine item types of the General Test of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and a faculty survey of perceptions of general learned abilities in relation to…

This paper summarizes the overall theme of a collection of six papers (each with separate commentary) inspired by research in cognitive psychology. The dominant approaches to instructing educationally disadvantaged children have focused on the teaching of basic skills, with little regard for the more advanced skills of reasoning, problem solving,…

The National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) is designed to monitor the transition of a national sample of young adults as they progress from junior to senior high school and then to postsecondary education or the world of work. An in-depth description is provided of the rationale, development, and psychometric properties of the…

In the spring of 1988, Massachusetts conducted its second Educational Assessment Program to assess the performance of students in grades 4, 8, and 12 in reading, mathematics, science, and social studies. Students' responses to open-ended questions in one form of the reading test were studied. One-twelfth of the fourth-graders, one-sixteenth of the…

This guide to secondary school French reading instruction addresses a variety of general and specific instructional issues. An introductory chapter discusses program objectives, minimum program requirements, and the population to be taught. The second chapter looks at theoretical aspects of the development of reading ability: current thoughts on…

Written from the perspective that the technology available for language study can be better used, a discussion of television use in second language instruction looks at imaginative uses of the medium for a variety of instructional purposes. The first section identifies opportunities for the use of television, including: as a motivator; in teaching…

Evaluation of bilingual education programs is limited by the absence of appropriate standards against which program success may be gauged. Normative and criterion models have been used, inadequately. The current paper revisits the normative model, and examines the relative advantages of using norms based on the performances of…

This report summarizes the results of the 1984 and 1985 administrations of the following tests in Hawaii: (1) the grade 8 Stanford Achievement Test (SAT), Advanced Level, 6th edition, of the Vocabulary, Reading Comprehension, Spelling, and Language Subtests; and (2) the grade 10 Stanford Test of Academic Skills (TASK), Level 1, 6th edition of the…

Reading evaluation should (1) be a continuous process using many samples of a learner's work, (2) allow students to engage in uninterrupted reading, (3) constitute a learning situation, and (4) indicate new directions for improvement in an open-ended manner. Current practices for evaluating children's reading processes are usually based on samples…

The University of Illinois' Language Learning Laboratory began the process of developing its own videotape materials in 1979 with limited resources. Interest grew gradually among faculty and the graduate teaching staff, who generally designed and produced their own materials and then shared them with colleagues. A wide variety of tapes has been…

The provincial results of the English 33 Achievement Test administered June 8, 1982, as part of the Student Achievement Testing Program of Alberta Education are presented in this report. Following a list of the requirements of Part A (written expression), the first section describes the categories used to assess total expression and the scoring…