Research has indicated that current information about reading and the effective teaching of reading has not yet made much impact on content area textbooks. As a result, there is much room for improvement in how textbooks are written. Recent research has yielded a great deal of information about what makes a text more understandable and supportive…

One of a series of semiannual reports, this publication contains 14 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. The titles of the articles and their authors are as follows: "Gestural Structure and Phonological Patterns" (Catherine P.…

Designed for use in the selection of apprentices, trainees, technical and trade personnel, and any other persons who need to read and understand text of a technical nature, this Applied Reading Test specimen set contains six passages and 32 items, has a 30-minute time limit, and is presented in a reusable multiple choice test booklet. The specimen…

To help achieve success, students must construct purposes for reading so that they can gain the appropriate kind of information while reading. After a student has set a purpose for reading, she/he may preview the material to be read. The next step is to read the material at an appropriate speed considering the purpose for reading and the nature of…

Because of extremely low salaries paid to teachers in the Brazilian public school system, the profession increasingly attracts only persons from the lower income levels who may not themselves be comfortable with the literacy skills they are supposed to teach. Working under extremely hard conditions, and being ill prepared for her profession, the…

A study conducted during a training program, in which students were learning to find main ideas, investigated how different kinds of strategy value information influenced children's reading comprehension. Subjects, 15 fourth-grade and 15 fifth-grade students who regularly received remedial reading comprehension instruction, were divided into three…

Of all the effective strategies available to college developmental reading students, annotating (noting important ideas or examples in text margins) and underlining have the widest appeal among students and the most practical application in any course. Annotating/underlining serves a dual function: students can isolate key ideas at the time of the…

A series of studies investigated the manner in which information is utilized during fixations in continuous reading. Utilization refers to visual information being processed to further the comprehension of the text being read, in contrast to registration, which refers to visual information simply being available to the brain. The studies…

Representing a comprehensive description of the use of informal reading inventories (IRIs), this book is designed to provide teachers and reading specialists with practical strategies for forming diagnostic impressions that are useful for planning reading instruction. Respectively, chapters discuss (1) the purpose and nature of IRIs; (2)…

Metadiscourse, or an author's presence in a text, and its benefits for improving textbooks and children's learning and attitudes are explored in this paper. Through a historical review, the paper reveals that using the interpersonal voice and the author's commentary are legitimate rhetorical devices. Interviews with prominent contemporary…

A study of the vocabulary adequacy of college students using words from a daily newspaper duplicated an earlier study using words from "Reader's Digest" which indicated a low level of adequacy. Two groups of 295 and 397 college juniors and seniors in teacher education courses indicated on a list of 80 words taken from a daily newspaper which ones…

A study was conducted to determine how effective webbing--schematic representation of main ideas and supporting details--would be in helping students build bridges between their reading of a text and outlining the material in it. Subjects were 21 sixth grade students, who had been working on outlining and were familiar with its purpose and form.…

A study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of self-directed questioning on comprehension. The self-directed questioning strategy involved making predictions, defining evidence that generates the predictions, evaluating subsequent clues, and reformulating predictions when necessary or devising new ones when previous ones are confirmed.…

How background knowledge of the content of a text affects reading comprehension and the role it plays in the diagnosis and instruction of reading comprehension skills for linguistically/culturally diverse (L/CD) students may be demonstrated through schema theory. Since a schema represents what is believed to be generally true about a class of…

Noting that many prereading discussions lead teachers to "mis-estimate" students' prior knowledge about a particular topic, this paper describes the Pre-Reading Plan (PReP) designed to help both students and teachers become aware of what students already know about a specific topic. Following an introduction, the first portion of the…