A survey of Canadian and United States reading education faculty was conducted to find out if there was a consensus as to the "classic" works in the field of reading research. The questionnaire included a brief definition of "classic study" and invited respondents to list works under five general headings: (1)…

This paper presents a coherent account of affect based on the functional properties of the nervous system. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the nature of a structural theory and contrasts it with a functional view. Then the functional view is discussed in more detail. The following two assumptions of the functional view are described:…

A study investigated the effects of sentence combining instruction on the reading comprehension and writing maturity of fifth grade children. The sample consisted of an experimental and a control group with 25 children in each group. For 6 weeks the experimental group received instruction in sentence combining, defined for purposes of the study as…

Two studies investigated the processing of metaphor, specifically (1) the extent to which metaphor is processed similarly to literal language and (2) the effects of the presence or absence of a specific context on processing. In the first study, 82 college students listened to one of four taped lectures, each containing 22 metaphors. The tapes…

Written primarily for teachers of elderly students and for elderly readers, this manual provides information about the elderly reader, about language, and about the reading process itself. The first chapter contains a review of current research on elderly readers that provides information about the materials they like to read, the materials they…

A speed reading/scholarship skills course was offered to college-bound students in the Dallas, Texas, school system in 1977-78. Approximately 1,700 students took the 60-day elective course in 20 different high schools. As measured by the Nelson-Denny Standardized Reading Test and compared to college freshman norms, students registered the…

Current textbooks on reading recommend six scoring systems to be used with cloze tests to find material of suitable difficulty for instruction. These six scoring systems, when applied to a single data source--300 cloze scores obtained from ninth grade students tested with ninth grade content materials--produced varied placements which at present…

Designed to provide an exchange of ideas about children's reading comprehension, this book has gathered insights and perspectives from both educators and psychologists concerning the comprehension process. The first section of the book consists of three chapters devoted to literature reviews, each dealing with an aspect of comprehension. Specific…

A study was conducted to discover what reading skills were required by employers for entry-level bookkeepers, what reading skills were rated as being important in the bookkeeping curriculum, and what the relationship was between the existing bookkeeping curriculum and employment requirements. A job reading task analysis (JRTA) was prepared and…

The past 20 years of research into the efficacy of advance organizers has resulted in little empirical support for their use. A primary reason for this lack of strong support is the absence of true objective descriptions and definitions of the organizers used and the concomitant poor control over their derivation and construction. This deficiency…

This report argues that the Mean Gaze Durations or eye movement records used by M. A. Just and P. A. Carpenter to develop a model of reading comprehension are an inappropriate measure of processing time. An alternative approach called Read to Right of Gaze (RRG-1), which assumes that more than one word can be read during a fixation, is recommended…

The schema theory of reading comprehension holds that an active interplay exists between the reader's cognitive structures (schemata) relevant to a text and the text itself. A study examined whether children varying in reading comprehension ability showed differences in the deployment of cognitive structures--specifically, whether good and poor…

The Reading-Spelling Vocabulary Program (RSVP) is a list of 900 words of highest frequency selected from 14 previous studies of words in print, spoken vocabulary, and children's and adults' handwriting. The words are divided into four levels and 60 lessons of 15 words each. When a sample test was constructed and administered to 266 elementary…

Children's understanding and use of anaphora and cohesive ties in comprehending text were studied by using selected school texts that had a number of cohesive ties deleted. It was hypothesized that the replacement of the deleted ties would indicate that the text within the location of a specific tie had been successfully read and understood.…

Twenty-four sixth grade students participated in a study that adapted earlier reading research to determine whether students would demonstrate sensitivity to the presence or absence of a relevant schema in a passage and whether skilled readers would show more use of the schema than would less skilled readers. Six skilled and six less skilled…