The first of three related reports, this volume describes the findings of the first phase of a study designed to identify teaching processes that are efficient in helping secondary school students learn to read. Following an introduction that provides background information about the study, the second chapter of the report discusses the design of…

Forty-four second grade students participated in a study examining the relationships between field dependence/independence (FDI), grammatical awareness, reading ability, and training in grammatical awareness. After the children were pretested for their levels of cognitive development, degree of field independence, grammatical awareness, and…

An integrated, three-dimensional cognitive model of reading comprehension was used to investigate the relationship between Piagetian theory (classificational reasoning abilities that emphasize the tacit use of metalinguistic concepts), and reading acquisition (word recognition and reading comprehension). Twenty-four second and third grade remedial…

A series of studies was conducted to: (1) examine the effects of headings on both recall (a memory task) and retrieval (a search task) from the same text; and (2) distinguish between retrieval from unfamiliar text and retrieval from familiar text. Pupils aged between 14 and 15 years of mixed reading ability took part in six separate studies, each…

Drawing upon reading and text comprehension theories and the sociolinguistic studies of M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan, this paper builds theoretical links between the reading and writing processes. The major portion of the paper discusses the five language concepts that undergird both processes: (1) text processing in both reading and writing…

Two experimental designs were used to test the hypothesis that abbreviations in classified advertisements decrease the reader's comprehension of such ads. In the first experimental design, 73 high school students read four ads (for employment, used cars, apartments for rent, and articles for sale) either with abbreviations or with all…

Based on the theory that a story's coherence depends directly on the causal cohesiveness of the story's individual events, this paper describes (1) a process by which readers use causal reasoning to connect events, (2) what memory representations result from this reasoning, and (3) the implications of test data on causal reasoning. Following a…

A study was undertaken to identify the strategies good and poor readers at the university level use when reading a text assignment. Forty-four study strategies were identified based on answers to a questionnaire concerning how they studied that was given to one hundred university freshmen enrolled in an elective reading and study skills class.…

Traditional surveys of children's literature have examined features such as text structure and topic, but have failed to take into account rhetorical elements such as author/reader distance, commentary, point of view, and inside view (insight into characters' minds). Similarly, they have glossed over aspects of character to character interaction,…

The schema theory of comprehension as it relates to understanding while reading is reviewed in this report. Several techniques for the study of on-line measurement of comprehension are described that are based on a series of ten stories, each with two versions. The report notes that when subjects were asked to generate interpretations of stories…

The research methodology and findings of a statewide survey designed to determine the specific competencies deemed essential by reading professionals are detailed in this report. Specific information supplied in the report includes (1) a description of the model for developing competencies for reading teachers, (2) the limitations of the study,…

A study assessed the effects of text structure and prior knowledge about its content on comprehension and recall of text by fourth and eighth grade students. Three groups, each with 15 students, were tested at each grade level. Subjects in the prior knowledge group heard and mastered a passage on one day and then heard, freely recalled, and…