The minimal comprehension principle asserts that the act of comprehension must entail an interaction between an incoming linguistic message and the reader's world knowledge. An analysis of current tests of reading comprehension indicates that test passages are likely to draw broadly from knowledge of the world, so that some of the variability in…

There are not nearly enough reading specialists to meet the needs of the large number of students with reading deficiencies. In order to determine the effectiveness of training teachers in content areas to play an active role in helping students improve their reading skills, 15 secondary level teachers representing the fields of mathematics,…

To examine the use of factual and inferential questions as adjunct material in prose learning, a study was undertaken in which undergraduate introductory psychology students used different study strategies on a prose comprehension test consisting of an equal number of factual and inferential multiple-choice items. One-hundred twenty students were…

The four papers in this collection discuss language perception and comprehension and report on experiments in those areas. The first paper, "The Influence of Non-Linguistic Knowledge on Perceiving and Verifying Sentences," discusses the reliance of language perception and comprehension on the interaction of linguistic and world…

The commonly-used instructional sequence in which children read material silently and then read it orally is simply not effective. The arguments presented by E.A. Betts in 1957 for silent before oral reading can be countered point by point. Studies that have compared various reading conditions have had serious limitations and have failed to show…

To encourage reluctant readers, teachers can use a technique called "read a book in an hour." Students are assigned individual chapters of a paperback novel to read silently. After they have finished reading, they retell the significant chapter events, state the conflicts, and identify the characters as the teacher records the…

Comprehension is a process that occurs within the reader and is at least partially dependent on cohesion and coherence. The concept of cohesion is used to show how sentences which are structurally independent of one another may be linked together. Cohesion exists within a text and is not the same as coherence, which is something the reader…

Extensive research has proven that the functions of the two hemispheres of the brain tend to be qualitatively different. The left hemisphere, which for most people is dominant, is the major controller of speech, reading, and writing; it is the hemisphere toward which education traditionally has been directed. The right hemisphere excels in…

The cloze test requires a student to fill gaps in a text with appropriate words where every nth word is deleted. The cloze procedure forms a test of a reader's ability to predict, on the basis of context, what word will occur. Test marking may be narrow, in which only the exact word omitted is counted as correct, or broad, where any acceptable…

Successful reading is a complex, interactive process in which the reader's experience and information are as important to comprehension as the content of the printed page. This article describes several reading processes, discusses the problems involved for the beginning reader, and indicates some implications for reading instruction. Five…

The articles in this journal for reading teachers stress the importance of comprehension in the reading process. The topics discussed include the following: inferences and comprehension, the learning process involved in comprehension, the gifted student and reading comprehension, the cloze procedure, language clues to reading comprehension,…

Children's expectations regarding the roles played in society by different groups of people have been shown to significantly affect their comprehension of sentences. This paper reports on a study designed to examine the way children's expectations affect the strategies they employ in two tasks tapping the organization of the semantic system. Sixty…

Compressed speech tapes--recordings of a voice reading a selection at the normal rate of approximately 150 words per minute that are speeded up to as much as 400 words a minute--can be used successfully with students to provide practice in improving reading rate and comprehension. In a field test conducted with 23 high school juniors and seniors…

This paper reports the outcomes of a correlational study that examined the relationships between visual and auditory perceptual skills, on the one hand, and comprehension that is independent of decoding, on the other. Five sets of test scores--a visual perceptual test (Coloured Progressive Matrices), an auditory perceptual test (Auditory Motor…

This study was designed to discover the answers to two general questions concerning the instrucitonal level of reading: (1) What is the percentage of word recognition that is necessary for second and fifth graders to maintain in order to achieve a certain percentage of comprehension? (2) Are those word recognition percentages the same for both…