Intended for students taking the Grade 12 Examination in English 30 in Alberta, Canada, this reading test (to be administered along with the questions booklet) contains 10 short reading selections taken from fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, including the following: "My Magical Metronome" (Lewis Thomas); "Queen Street…

Intended for students taking the Grade 12 Diploma Examinations in English 33 in Alberta, Canada, this reading test (to be administered along with the questions booklet) contains 10 short reading selections taken from fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, including the following: "How to Set a World Record" (William Allen); "Andy…

Intended for students taking the Grade 12 Diploma Examinations in English 33 in Alberta, Canada, this reading test contains 70 multiple choice test items over the 10 readings in the readings booklet. The questions examine students' skills in (1) understanding meanings, (2) understanding and interpreting the relationships between form and content,…

Intended for students taking the Grade 9 English Language Arts Achievement Test in Alberta, Canada, this reading test (to be administered along with the questions booklet) contains eight short reading selections taken from fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including the following: "Thieving Raffles" (Eric Nicol); "Flight of the…

Intended for students taking the Grade 9 Language Arts Achievement Test in Alberta, Canada, this reading test contains 65 multiple choice test items related to the eight selections in the reading booklet and to a cartoon and four additional reading selections within this booklet. The questions examine the student's skills in (1) understanding…

Teachers who do not use specifically communicatively-oriented textbooks can still derive much useful communicative language work from them. A key to success is engaging the student in the reading and comprehension of the text. Class exercises that can be used as pre-reading or pre-listening activities include: (1) giving students key words or…

Predicated on the assumption that many of the problems exhibited by learning disabled children arise from difficulties they have in processing information, the program of research described in this paper was undertaken to (1) identify reading comprehension difficulties that are due to disorders in the reader, and (2) design and test effective…

Focusing on trends in reading achievement during the period from l970 to l984, this report draws from national assessments that involved more than 250,000 9-, 13-, and 17-year-old students from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. The first chapter (1) provides an overview of the report; (2) summarizes recent achievements documented by the…

A study of the language proficiency of students in core French programs in a number of Eastern Ontario (Canada) high schools looked at the listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and oral skills of students in grades 9, 10, and 12. Comparisons were made across and within school districts, and also with previous groups tested. Findings show…

This critical review of "Becoming a Nation of Readers" states that the Commission on Reading report contains sensible and practical recommendations, though it is not wholly representative of all the available research on reading and it contains occasional insensitivities to the potential problems within its recommendations. The first…

Reading is a multileveled, interactive, and hypothesis-generating process in which readers construct a meaningful representation of text by using their knowledge of the world and of language. Reviewing research on the reading process, it is clear that context, script (a form of general event representation derived from and applied to social…

The teacher handbook for Progressive Achievement Tests (PATs) in Reading presents an overall description of these survey tests in reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge for school years 3 to 9. There are two alternative forms of each test: (1) the Reading Comprehension tests are designed to measure two major aspects of reading skills…

Investigating the extent to which reading to children and book type affect kindergartners' ability to recall, write about, and read the text that their teacher has just read to them, a study examined the effects that the story reading techniques of six kindergarten teachers had on 52 of their students during three book reading sessions. On three…

Intended for students taking Grade 12 Diploma Examinations in English 33 in Alberta, Canada, this reading test contains 70 multiple choice test items related to the 10 selections in an accompanying reading booklet. The questions examine students' skills in (1) understanding meanings; (2) understanding and interpreting the relationships between…

Two studies examined the effects of writing on subject learning. For the first study, 322 ninth and eleventh grade students read passages from high school social studies and science texts and engaged in six writing-to-study conditions. Students who wrote essays scored lower on immediate topic knowledge posttests, while the students who used study…