Reviews work on three areas of visual information that are available to readers: information provided by the conventional arrangements of the print on the page, by the features of each letter, and by the shapes of entire words. (HOD)

More than 200 college students were surveyed to determine what factors affected their reading habits when they were younger. School-related factors that encouraged reading included paperback book clubs and teachers who made reading enjoyable. Factors that discouraged reading included oral reading and uninteresting reading materials. (FL)

Reports that elementary school principals want to become more involved with reading programs in their schools. Shows also that they see their professional roles as more administrative than supervisory. (FL)

Argues that researchers and classroom teachers need not be adversaries and uses examples from the area of domain knowledge to demonstrate how teachers can adapt research findings to their reading lessons. (FL)

Concludes that beginning English-as-a-second-language students might be getting an instructional message about the reading process that overemphasizes the least useful aspects of print at the expense of comprehension. (FL)

Suggests that most countries using an alphabetic language system judge success in beginning reading as the ability to do tasks demonstrating mastery of the same set of skills, but that the types of tasks used to measure these skills and the number of skills tested vary from country to country. (FL)

Reviews research and concludes that many studies support the use of various types of writing to help students develop their reading skills. (AEA)

The author maintains that subject teachers will not fear or resent the task of improving reading performance in their content areas if they realize that reading is not additional content requiring extra class time but rather a way to improve students' comprehension of their own course content. (SJL)

Describes the results of a project designed to improve children's reading skills by providing them with television program scripts to read prior to viewing the program. (JMF)

Three classes of research on reading are identified. The articles of this section pertain to investigation of the organization and operation of basic processing mechanisms underlying skilled reading; each is described briefly and commented upon. Particular attention is devoted to the articles on context effects. (Author/RD)

Examines the relationship between syntactic maturity of oral language and reading achievement of first-grade students and compares this aspect of language competency to several traditional factors of reading readiness. (FL)

This study of various methods of teaching English as a foreign language concludes that an intensive method in which university students study passages in detail yields the best results. (AEA)

Reports on two experiments concerned with the use of the limited capacity cognitive processing system in a later stage of reading: the processes associated with processing information and knowledge from text for retention. (HOD)

Three measures--logical reasoning ability, lexical comprehension, and home teaching activities--provided the best overall model in accounting for differences in children's performances across the print awareness measures. (HOD)

Reports that five basal reader programs, kindergarten through grade six, give far more attention to assessment and practice than to direct, explicit, comprehension instruction. (AEA)