A reading instructor interested in reliving the experience of learning to read for the first time attempted to read "Androcles and the Lion" in Shavian Alphabet. The would-be reader of Shavian faces a page of hooks and slants completely unfamiliar, but there is no translation problem. As soon as the reader can pronounce out loud the…

Focusing on the teaching of comprehension strategies, this paper describes studies designed to identify settings in which effective strategies instruction was being carried out and details the conclusions that can be drawn from the studies. The paper begins with a description of comprehension strategies instruction in the 1970s and 1980s. The…

A study examined what happened when a group of adult students read a hypertext for the goal of answering specific questions. Subjects, 30 students enrolled in an upper-division psychology course at a state university in the northwestern United States, read a binary tree-structured hypertext to answer three two-part questions on the topic of…

Employing the community attachment model, a study hypothesized that the greater the personal experiences in and the greater the attachments to a community, the greater the reading of the local newspaper. The primary logic is that social ties and feelings of attachment generate needs for information that can be satisfied through reading of the…

A study investigated whether the presence or size of a photograph accompanying a story affects readers' attention, recall, and comprehension of newspaper articles. The three hypotheses postulated are: (1) readers are more likely to pay attention to stories on a page which includes a large photo than to stories on a page containing a small photo or…

A study tested the notion that information stories in "USA Today" are more readable because its editors shorten them by leaving out background details. It also examined whether readers comprehend as much from stories written in "USA Today" style as they do from stories written in the more traditional "New York Times"…

Noting that 80% of children will learn to read no matter what method is used to teach them, this information sheet offers a brief overview of research on reading impairments undertaken at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The information sheet first describes the casualties of mild and severe reading…

A recurring theme within the prolific body of research on reader response is that of reader stance. Although several prominent theories of reader response spring from different perspectives, they share one common property: each describes reader response in terms of two opposed domains with particular responses falling somewhere on a continuum…

A study examined the relative contributions of semantic and non-semantic sources of redundancy in printed English, which play a central role in information processing models. Subjects, 40 undergraduate college students, were divided into two groups. One group predicted missing characters using English text, and the second group was required to…

Eye movements of 32 newspaper readers (ranging in age from 22 to 50 years) were measured as they viewed four pages of varying use of color and black-and-white photographs. The eye-fixation data recorded by a computerized apparatus showed precisely where subjects looked, in what order they processed information on the page, and how long and how…

A study investigated the attitudes toward reading of Western Kansas students in grades 1-6. Of the 156 students in the sample, 45 participated in the study group while 111 constituted the control group. The independent variables were participation status, achievement in reading, gender, socioeconomic class status, intelligence test scores, and…

Noting that electronic technology is becoming more advanced and more available, this paper argues that current conceptions of literacy as the ability to read and write should be expanded to include electronic reading and writing. The paper discusses: (1) four ways in which electronic texts are different from printed texts; (2) how students can be…

A study investigated the impact of direct instruction on reading comprehension strategies and the degree to which cooperative learning processes enhance students' learning of strategies. Subjects, 486 third- and fourth-grade students in four elementary schools from an ethnically diverse school district in a medium-sized city in central…

A study examined how many of 11 key words in 4 famous Mother Goose nursery rhymes were understood by parents of first graders. The first questionnaire (designed to determine if context clues were helpful in deciphering what words meant) was returned by 37 parents in an urban school district and by 49 parents in a suburban school district. The…

This pamphlet provides current information about the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Reading. In addition to describing the purpose and goals of the NAEP, the pamphlet discusses the reasons for assessing reading, the 1992 NAEP in Reading (including recent changes), the guidelines used to create a framework for reading…