Since psycholinguistic research suggests that readers ascribe meaning by sampling grapho-phonemic, syntactic, and semantic text features, a study was conducted to investigate which cue strategies readers of different abilities utilized, and whether these strategies were mediated by levels of cognitive development. The subjects were 50 second grade…

A pilot study investigated the quality of diagnostic decisions that are made on the basis of a precise model of reading and learning to read. The study was carried out by creating a computer simulated reading clinician that embodied a recent model of the reading process and by observing the behavior of this simulated clinician as it diagnosed…

A profile of the articles that appeared in the first ten volumes of "Research in the Teaching of English" indicates that throughout the decade of the 1970s more research effort was directed toward language and composition than was directed toward literature and more toward reading than toward nonprint media. Research for the 1980s should focus on…

This paper suggests that teachers concentrate on the ideational and structural properties of text rather than on information acquired from readability formulas when selecting and using texts. Emphasis is given to the importance of context in the analysis of text, and a framework is suggested for examining the text considering the functions texts…

Forty adults served as subjects in a study of the comprehensibility of instructions conditioned by multicategory compounds, such as "If you are male, or both married and not employed, go to question 3." The stimulus materials were 96 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press (button) Y," in which "X" was…

This paper is intended to serve as an introduction to text analysis as a research tool and vehicle for improving instruction. In terms of perspective, two major theses are maintained throughout the paper: text analysis should be used within the context of understanding that a multiplicity of variables can influence reader/text interactions, and…

Two studies assessed third, fifth, and seventh grade children's sensitivity to relative importance in prose. Children rated importance similarly to adults when assigned perspectives from which to read. The children's ratings were not necessarily idiosyncratic: they agreed more with each other than with adults rating the same material.…

Individual pupil scores, school characteristics, and characteristics of reading programs were assessed in elementary school programs in 36 communities, forming a data bank of information on 6,753 students from grades one through six enrolled in special reading programs across the country. A series of analyses were performed to determine the school…

To identify when visual information is acquired during reading, an experiment was designed in which rapid display changes were made contingent upon the state of the eye. This was accomplished by programing a computer to detect within a few milliseconds whether the eye is in a saccade or fixation. By then replacing a line of text with some other…

After reiterating the findings of an earlier examination of job literacy, this paper discusses the results of a job literacy survey involving interviews with 107 individuals representing 100 occupations ranging from short-order cooks and assembly-line workers to lawyers and corporation vice-presidents. Other aspects of the research findings…

Models of reading have been proposed to guide researchers and educators in their theoretical research and instructional planning. The models specify important properties of the material to be read and processes the learner uses while reading. Two separate models of reading by K.S. Goodman and D. Rumelhart are similar in that they describe reading…

Ten randomly picked children of prekindergarten age participated in a study that focused on whether feature analysis can be used as an aid in the recognition of the alphabet. The five children in the control group were introduced to the letters as a whole, while the five children in the experimental group were introduced to the whole letters but…

THE HYPOTHESIS THAT WHEN ASSOCIATED PAIRS OF WORDS ARE PRESENTED, SPEED OF RECOGNITION WILL BE FASTER THAN WHEN NONASSOCIATED WORD PAIRS ARE PRESENTED OR WHEN A TARGET WORD IS PRESENTED BY ITSELF WAS TESTED. TWENTY UNIVERSITY STUDENTS, INITIALLY SCREENED FOR VISION, WERE ASSIGNED RANDOMLY TO ROWS OF A 5 X 5 REPEATED-MEASURES LATIN SQUARE DESIGN.…

THE SECOND CUMULATIVE EDITION OF THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER/CLEARINGHOUSE ON THE RETRIEVAL OF INFORMATION AND EVALUATION IN READING (ERIC/CRIER) INFORMATIONAL PUBLICATIONS INCLUDES THREE NEWSLETTERS AND THREE INFORMATION BRIEFS. THE NEWSLETTERS PRESENT DISCUSSIONS OF THE ERIC/CRIER DOCUMENT PROCESSING FOR RESEARCH IN EDUCATION,…

The development of the Primary Pupil Reading Attitude Inventory to measure recreational reading attitudes is described. Twenty second and third graders were interviewed to determine favorite after school and weekend activities. The nine most frequently named activities and three reading activities were then depicted by an artist in separate…