This paper evaluates widely used, standardized tests of reading within the framework of four interdependent reading components: (1) decoding speed and accuracy; (2) accuracy, fluency, and flexibility of determining semantic meaning of words; (3) sentence comprehension; and (4) passage dependent sentence comprehension. Among the types of…

A summer institute trained 18 teachers to identify and plan curriculum for gifted minority and disadvantaged young children from culturally different and remote rural areas. Theory and practicum emphases were included in the program. Teachers were trained in the Structure of the Intellect (SOI) model. Sixty-eight children from the Alpine (Texas)…

This 3-year project examined the processes and strategies employed by English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) and native-English-speaking students when learning from academic texts. A conceptual model guided the analysis of talk aloud protocols elicited from students as they answered questions from textbook materials used in an introductory…

Foreign Workers' German (FWG) refers to the acquired German language skills of workers from various countries who were recruited to West Germany between 1955 and 1973 to fill menial, undesirable jobs. Contact between these workers and native German speakers was limited because of the nature of the foreigners' work, the tendency toward residential…

A dictionary of Djinang, a member of the Nhangu group of Australian Aboriginal languages, consists of three parts. The first is an alphabetically-organized listing of Djinang words and contains one or more of these fields of information for each: a Djinang word or phrase, dialect information, part of speech, English meaning, Roget's Thesaurus…

An approach to text translation that focuses on understanding the original text and the writer's intentions is outlined. The approach uses a sequence of steps including: studying the text carefully, knowing the writer's background, analyzing the text, understanding the writer's use of words, normalizing the text's grammatical form, composing the…

A study investigated how two text-based factors, word relationships and surface syntactic structure, interact with readers' ability to analyze the semantic relationships and make inferences based on those analyses. In each passage, the influence of word relationships was assessed by manipulating the degree of semantic entailment between two words…

A pilot study of discourse in a practicum reading class for instruction in English as a second language examines miscommunication between non-native English speakers. Teachers and their students read transcripts of episodes from classroom discussions and wrote line-by-line analyses of what they understood was being said. Similarities and…

A study measured the connotations of selected health education related journals to their professional readers. The subjects were 250 randomly selected, college-affiliated health educators listed in "A National Directory of College and University Health Education Programs and Facilities 1981." Journals evaluated included: (1) "American College…

This book, intended for researchers in the psychology of reading and language, college students in psychology and education, teachers of reading, and educators in general, is designed to be used in a course on the psychology of reading or the psychology of language comprehension. The book contains the following chapters: (1) "An Introduction and…

Recognizing a word in a meaningful text involves processes that combine information from many different sources, and both bottom-up processes (such as feature extraction and letter recognition) and top-down processes (contextual information) are thought to interact when skilled readers recognize words. Two similar experiments investigated word…

A discussion of passives in the context of generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG) looks at two problems associated with a lexical rule that derives passive participles from active verbs. The first occurs with sentences whose main verb takes an NP and does not have a passive counterpart. This situation requires a more restrictive metarule, and…

The functions of blocking text with horizontal rules and providing headings of different types are discussed. Headings may be encoded or function as access structures, while blocking segments text and provides retrieval cues. These issues were tested in two experiments. College students read a 2000-word passage. In the first experiment, no…

A stylistics-based approach to teaching poetry in the English as a foreign language classroom is examined. Since students may not have the linguistic skills to appreciate a poem, an analytical framework is proposed that includes the elements of repetition, confusion, and surprise. Reference is made to two poems, "In a Season of Unemployment"…

This study investigated the capability of Indiana elementary and secondary school teachers to deal effectively with education about the environment and related energy issues. Questions addressed were: (1) What do Indiana teachers know about their physical environment? (2) How do Indiana teachers feel about the environment? and (3) How do the…