Questioning strategies, whether teacher- or student-generated, can be a major tool in developing reading comprehension. Teachers can maximize the benefits of teacher directed questioning by (1) providing clues before providing answers to questions, (2) acknowledging appropriate responses with two or three seconds of eye contact, (3) allowing…

A series of studies with adults resulted in a standardized test to assess children's comprehension of main ideas in simple narratives. The test, utilizing stories from the WISC-R picture arrangement task, was then employed in a developmental investigation with second, fifth, and eighth grade students. Each student completed the WISC-R arrangement…

More than 100 college students enrolled in a reading and study skills course participated in a study designed to show the effects of retrieval speed on adult reading comprehension. A microcomputer version of the Posner task was used to measure memory retrieval speed, and reading and listening comprehension were measured from McCall-Crabbs…

Designed to assess immediate and delayed comprehension of expository prose, this instrument is a 40-item multiple-choice test composed of open-ended stems, each followed by four nonoverlapping choices. Control of content of the items was based upon an analysis of the accompanying 1,300-word passage on the Kalahari Desert. Validity, reliability,…

Designed to assess a reader's achievement in various reading skills for the purpose of instructional placement, the instrument contains three forms (A, B, C), each of which contains 50 items. The items test comprehension of idioms and direct statements, with emphasis on drawing inferences. Administration time for each test is 25 minutes. (This…

Three studies, carried out independently at Ben Gurion University and at Haifa University, tested students of comparable English proficiency who were enrolled in similar courses of English reading comprehension. The studies were carried out to investigate the effect of dictionary use in examinations on students' test performance. In the study at…

A study was conducted to determine (1) the nature and range of self-testing procedures that college students use to monitor their reading comprehension; (2) whether their epistomological beliefs influence the nature of their comprehension monitoring procedures; and (3) whether the level of processing dictated by the test component of their reading…

While story grammar and cognitive science theories of stories state or imply that a story will be more interesting if the protagonist experiences difficulty in attaining his or her goal, neither theory considers that the importance of the goal may also affect how interesting the story is. The structural-affect theory, however, defines stories on…

A study investigated the effect of writing on reading comprehension, vocabulary, and attitude of college freshmen enrolled in a reading course. Thirty-eight students were randomly assigned to either an experimental or a control group. Reading instruction varied only in the use of a writing component for the experimental group. Instruments used in…

Subjects in this study were 69 fourth-grade students enrolled in a Chapter 1 program who received low scores on a standardized reading comprehension test in the spring of 1982. One group (n=35) received 15 minutes of programed reading tutoring each day throughout the 1982-1983 school year as a supplement to classroom instruction. The Houghton…

A semantic web visually represents concepts and their relationships in an organized schema. It is an aid to comprehending printed material in a more concrete way through the illustration of main ideas, supporting details, and their relationships in a reading selection. A semantic web consists of four basic components: (1) a core question asked by…

The use of a comprehension question, involving reading a Latin paragraph and then answering related questions, is thought unnecessary for the British Ordinary-level examination. Suggested alterations are: reconsideration of skills being tested; use of such questions only where not redundant; comprehension as part of literary reading instead. (CHK)

The experimental evidence on the value of a sentence-combining approach to improving reading comprehension is still sparse, but the possibilities seem rich.

In reviewing views on the use of L1 in L2 classrooms, the author argues for the benefits of using L1. The author argues for the benefits of written translation activities based on the ideas that translation uses authentic materials, is interactive, learner-centered, and promotes learner autonomy. The author also argues that written translation…