To assess the context in which information is presented to readers and to know what demands information being presented makes of an audience, IBM designed three procedures to help gather such material. First, customer sites are visited to interview representatives from the intended audience and see the environments in which the information will be…

A transactional investigation of reading considers comprehension to be more than the duplication of the author's message. Rather, it entails the readers' interpretation of the textual representation that he or she has constructed. Thus, researchers must ask how the reader duplicated the author's creative role. The goal, in other words, is to…

Examines the effect of repatterning representative passages from a tenth grade social studies text upon the average sophomore's comprehension. (RB)

Acknowledging widely recognized shortcomings of readability formulas, the authors propose a technique for analyzing syntactic complexity. (RB)

Analysis of the Rinsland vocabulary list indicated that while the list was dated, it was more than adequate for purposes of classroom instruction. (RB)

Sixty skilled and 60 less-skilled readers were tested for oral reading skills at the end of one, two, and three years of reading instruction, to study the acquisition of reading fluency. A 3 x 2 x 3 ANOVA was used to analyze the influence of years of practice and instruction, reading skill, and levels of word accuracy on oral reading fluency.…

This report examines the theory that when people understand a text, they create a complex scenario (or model) within which the events described might plausibly occur. In order to study construction and revision of such models, five subjects were given difficult-to-understand texts, and were later asked to discuss the processing they went through…

This booklet reviews reading research that was reported in Great Britain during 1973. The introductory pages highlight research in reading standards and tests, dyslexia and specific reading difficulties, remedial reading instruction, reading and its relation to language, reading materials, and reading interests. Annotated bibliographies list…

This panel study was designed to measure the adoption level over a period of one year for a set of ten reading programs being promoted by NIE/HEW. One panel sample included 200 randomly selected school districts; a second panel sample included 100 school systems that had ordered one or more booklets describing the programs by returning a coupon…

Ten graduate English majors responded to 21 samples of literary discourse chosen to represent Kinneavy's (1971) categories; the selections contained a total of 513 cloze situations. This paper reports the results of an analysis of the clues which the readers reported using when they correctly completed the clozed items. A 14-category…

Ten Graduate English majors responded to 21 samples of literary discourse chosen to represent Kinneavy's (1971) categories; the selections contained a total of 513 cloze situations. Only exact replacement of the deleted nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs was scored as correct. Analysis of results indicated that replacement in poetry was…

A well-planned, effective inservice program should include the following criteria: long-range preparation involving all staff, follow-up supportive services, focus on teachers' stated needs, cooperation of teachers and teacher educators in discovering how teachers can continue to grow, development of knowledge about resources and necessary…

Syntax in four published series of elementary school readers was analyzed to discover patterns of complexity increasing from first to sixth grade, to identify structures accounting for differences across the grades, and to compare the frequency of specific structures among the series. Analyses of 16 surface structures representing complexities…

Thirty-two seventh-grade remedial readers participated in a study of the effects of seven folktales upon specific attitudes. A 28-item Likert scale containing four items specifically related to each folktale was administered as a pretest and readministered three days later as a posttest. Analysis of results indicated that there had been no…

One hundred forty-three seventh-grade students were assessed in the areas of word attack and comprehension. This study focused on the 71 students with the lowest total word-attack scores. Results indicated that all comprehension subskills had strong relationships to overall comprehension, but that many word-attack subskills had only low,…