EVIDENCE SUGGESTS READING ABILITY IS RELATED TO OTHER COMMUNICATION SKILLS SUCH AS LISTENING AND SPEAKING. DISTRUPTION IN THE PROCESS OF RECEIVING, ANALYZING, AND UTILIZING AUDITORY STIMULI MAY HAVE DELETERIOUS EFFECTS UPON A CHILD'S DEVELOPMENT OF READING SKILLS, ESPECIALLY IF THIS DISRUPTION OCCURS IN PRESCHOOL CHILDREN. THOSE GROWING UP IN…

A STUDY DESIGNED TO DETERMINE THE EFFECT ON CLASS PERFORMANCE OF VERBAL CUES ADMINISTERED AS PUPILS WORKED ON A GROUP READING TEST WAS CONDUCTED. THE SUBJECTS WERE PUPILS IN 18 SECOND-GRADE CLASSES AND 18 THIRD-GRADE CLASSES TO WHICH 36 FEMALE STUDENT TEACHERS WERE ASSIGNED. THE TASKS WERE TWO SUBTESTS OF THE "NEW DEVELOPMENTAL READING…

Twenty-six women and 26 men enrolled in a humanities course at Michigan Technological University wrote their initial impressions to short stories by James Joyce, James Baldwin, Doris Lessing, and Virginia Woolf. The names were removed and the journal entries were analyzed in light of these four questions: (1) Do women refer to their personal…

A research project investigated the process of reading comprehension through which the reader generates a semantic representation of the message conveyed by a text. The first focus of the project was an examination of the functioning of abstract knowledge in text comprehension. Studies were conducted to explore the activation of proposition…

Results from studies of language identification in noise and of word identification from tachistoscopic presentation clearly indicate that contextual information can be used to facilitate word identification under inadequate stimulus conditions. But these results do not provide strong evidence that such an interaction is occurring during normal…

This report addresses the state of the art of research on teaching reading comprehension by (1) describing the nature and distribution of research in teaching reading comprehension in the context of stated or implied instructional goals; (2) considering issues of methodological significance as they emerge; and (3) suggesting some reasonable…

This report provides a summary of the results of a three-year evaluation study of the Right to Read Special Emphasis Project, which was undertaken to determine if intensive programs of reading instruction introduced at an early age could change patterns of reading achievement in schools where large numbers of students read one or more grades below…

Since psycholinguistic research suggests that readers ascribe meaning by sampling grapho-phonemic, syntactic, and semantic text features, a study was conducted to investigate which cue strategies readers of different abilities utilized, and whether these strategies were mediated by levels of cognitive development. The subjects were 50 second grade…

A pilot study investigated the quality of diagnostic decisions that are made on the basis of a precise model of reading and learning to read. The study was carried out by creating a computer simulated reading clinician that embodied a recent model of the reading process and by observing the behavior of this simulated clinician as it diagnosed…

A profile of the articles that appeared in the first ten volumes of "Research in the Teaching of English" indicates that throughout the decade of the 1970s more research effort was directed toward language and composition than was directed toward literature and more toward reading than toward nonprint media. Research for the 1980s should focus on…

This paper suggests that teachers concentrate on the ideational and structural properties of text rather than on information acquired from readability formulas when selecting and using texts. Emphasis is given to the importance of context in the analysis of text, and a framework is suggested for examining the text considering the functions texts…

Forty adults served as subjects in a study of the comprehensibility of instructions conditioned by multicategory compounds, such as "If you are male, or both married and not employed, go to question 3." The stimulus materials were 96 sentence frames of the form, "If you are X, press (button) Y," in which "X" was…

This paper is intended to serve as an introduction to text analysis as a research tool and vehicle for improving instruction. In terms of perspective, two major theses are maintained throughout the paper: text analysis should be used within the context of understanding that a multiplicity of variables can influence reader/text interactions, and…

Two studies assessed third, fifth, and seventh grade children's sensitivity to relative importance in prose. Children rated importance similarly to adults when assigned perspectives from which to read. The children's ratings were not necessarily idiosyncratic: they agreed more with each other than with adults rating the same material.…

Individual pupil scores, school characteristics, and characteristics of reading programs were assessed in elementary school programs in 36 communities, forming a data bank of information on 6,753 students from grades one through six enrolled in special reading programs across the country. A series of analyses were performed to determine the school…