A study was conducted to discover what adult literacy students in Northern Ireland felt about a series of booklets that had been developed especially for such students and to find out the students' levels of comprehension of the materials--specifically to determine if comprehension depended on the subject's reading age. Twenty-one male students…

A comparative analysis of the oral reading miscues of 20 average and above-average readers entering sixth grade was made in relation to syntax, semantics, and patterns of comprehension and grammatical relationships. Miscues generated while reading passages in science, social studies, mathematics, and literature were analyzed, and the relationship…

The effects of graphic preorganizers (structured overviews) and prereading vocabulary instruction upon literal (lower level) and inferential/evaluative (upper level) comprehension was studied, using six sections of college students enrolled in a developmental reading and study skills course. The class sections were randomly assigned to use either…

C. Smith's "read a book in an hour" procedure for the development of listening and reading comprehension and B. Beyer's "hamburger writing" procedure for the development of composition skills formed the basis of a teaching technique that provided students with problem solving tasks, a procedure for writing compositions, and exposure to a classic…

As part of a continuing effort by the Indiana Department of Public Instruction to share practical, easy-to-implement reading techniques, this booklet offers a collection of teaching activities under various topics related to reading. Of the eight sections in the booklet, four deal with writing, because an anticipated outgrowth of improved skill in…

Two experiments investigated the relationship between cultural schemata and reading comprehension. Subjects for the first experiment were 186 eighth grade students who attended one of five schools--two predominately black inner-city schools, two predominately white working class area schools, and a predominately white agricultural area school.…

The results of the 1979-80 reading and literature assessment conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are contained in this report. In addition to the national results, the report describes the performance of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students in various cohorts defined by geographic region, sex, race/ethnicity, parental…

The fourth in a series concerning some implications of a learner's cognitive style for the development of reading competence, this paper reports on a study of the oral reading miscues of field dependent and field independent above-average eighth grade readers on content area materials. Results reported indicate that field dependent below-average…

Recent studies on written communication have emphasized the importance of discourse organization and rhetoric for the learning of reading and writing in a foreign language. This paper describes an attempt at a contrastive study of specialized discourse in French and in English. A corpus of medical articles all on the same subject has been analysed…

The Learning Activities Questionnaire (LAQ) was designed and developed to identify which of the following learning strategies were used by individuals in a variety of academic and training environments: rote (passive and active); physical; elaboration; and grouping. After undergoing two pilot tests, the final version of the LAQ was administered to…

Two studies examined certain aspects of discourse analysis to determine their value in classroom use. The first study explored the relationships among information recalled as assessed by informal reading inventory comprehension questions, unaided retelling, and schema based retelling. Subjects were 15 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students who…

A modified cloze procedure was used in two studies designed to gain insight into the silent reading process. In the first, involving a small group of third- and fourth-grade children, several stories were prepared based on the assumption that the cloze procedure might be manipulated to reveal a reader's use of semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic…

Reading comprehension tests usually contain reading passages followed by multiple choice questions about the passages; but one potential weakness of this format is that the questions may be "passage independent," answerable without necessarily reading the passage first. When examining this phenomenon by assessing a particular test, the…

Twenty third-grade children, all of whom scored below 90% accuracy in word recognition and comprehension at grade level, served as subjects in an investigation of the effects on reading fluency of four attentional activities: repeating directions, listening to a story paced or stimulated at 225 words per minute while reading the story, learning…

To develop a theoretical model of the reading process of the deaf, a study was devised that tested the viability of the Goodman reading model applied to sign language and evaluated a variety of comprehension-assessing techniques to identify those that provide the most information about a deaf reader's comprehension. For the study, four deaf…