A model for the levels of social interaction between author and reader provides a framework for examining the devices through which the author engages the reader. An important aspect of this model is the creation of additional levels of social interaction involving, for example, an "implied author" and an "implied reader."…

Noting that one reason for the discrepant results found in research on reading difficulties is the variety of approaches used to assess reading and spelling problems, this paper examines two of these approaches in terms of their implicit assumptions and inherent failings. The paper first discusses the etiological approach, which tries to identify…

A study was devised to determine whether internal reading flexibility would be manifested by individual proficient readers, operating in the "rauding" mode (typical reading manner), and observed in a natural setting reading passages from textbook materials. Reading times were examined using both number of standard words and number of…

Research was conducted concerning the efficacy of advance organizers and structured overviews in aiding student recall. The research was modeled on a process described by J.R. Platt that involves refining experiments and testing alternative hypotheses. Four studies that gradually refined experimental error were conducted on the effects of advance…

The first part of this paper on prose analysis explains how structural analysis of text can be used in reading research. This explanation focuses on three methodological uses of prose analysis: (1) the identification of the content and organization of the text for use in a scoring system, (2) the measurement of variations between the text and the…

A study examined the teachers' manuals for five basal reader programs, kindergarten through grade six, to discover their recommendations for comprehension instruction. The series analyzed were "Pathfinder," published by Allyn and Bacon; "Reading 720," by Ginn and Company; "Bookmark Reading Program," by Harcourt,…

Children and adult readers were compared for the degree to which they were able to avoid grapheme-to-phoneme translation in word naming, for how much they benefited from redundant phonemic information, and for the degree to which they were disturbed by minor changes in graphemes that were still phonemically appropriate. Hebrew was the target…

Differences in semantic recall between students hypothesized as having either a high or a low analytic style were investigated. Styles were determined by the amount of bilateral alpha activity measured from the cerebral cortex of the brain during eyes-open baseline recordings. The results indicated that when expository text was tightly structured,…

An experiment was conducted to test the effects of isolating and identifying generalities and instances in written prose instruction on student performance. Eighty college students were given either a typical chapter from a college textbook that included a summary, the same chapter with the summary removed, a modified version of the chapter in…

A study was conducted to find a manipulation that could be performed on a text (roughly analogous to real instructional material) which would lead readers to process that text more efficiently. One-hundred five college students were placed into either an experimental or a control group. Students in the control group were given an unchanged version…

Ninety college students wrote free-recall protocols immediately after reading each of three different passages in a study of how three factors affected the comprehension and recall of expository discourse. The three factors were the order in which a passage was read within a series of passages, the rhetorical predicate structure of the passage…

A study examined the effect on speed and comprehension performance of one silent rereading following an initial silent reading. Each of 17 fourth grade students silently read two 500-word selections, which were written at the third grade level, and then responded orally to 20 literal and above-literal questions based on the materials. The silent…

A study was conducted to analyze and compare the reading interests of adults from three educational levels. Fourteen adults in a community college reading center, 20 adults from various professional occupations, and 23 adults from a reading education class were given a reading interest inventory concerned with their reading habits and preferences…

Eighty-four elementary school children participated in a two-part experiment replicating an earlier experiment that tested the hypothesis that children would offer semantic explanations for words presented orally more frequently than for words presented in written form. This experiment used subjects from a population different in socioeconomic…

A study of the effects of using the MRM (message unit--verb unit--message unit) instructional system on reading comprehension was studied using 69 college freshmen, 37 in an experimental group and 32 in a control group. Both groups were engaged in a variety of activities designed to promote greater reading efficiency as a regular part of their…