This study concerns the role of structural properties of scientific prose: description of relations and explanation of mechanisms. The latter is isolated as a characteristics related to creative problem solving. (Author/GK)

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the influence of review on children's delayed retention of prose passages. Results indicated repetition of the original learning experience was the most effective review treatment. (Author/DB)

Results of a study involving approximately 500 sixth and seventh graders suggest that a two-column layout with traditional paragraphing denotation is more readable than a single-column layout, but that an extreme line length does not place an undue strain on the reader. (Examples of the two formats are included.) (GT)

Subjects read a passage and were questioned about the location or content of certain items in the passage. Performance was measured by monitoring response latencies and eye fixations. Apparently the locative information provides an index to the spatial distribution of sentences in the passage. (Author/RC)

Examines the accuracy of quoted speech in newspapers, focusing on what people can remember verbatim and how that information relates to language processing, comprehension, and the mental representation of prose. Finds that memory for meaning was better than memory for verbatim prose, though memory for both was high. (MM)

Argues that, in poetry where phonological patterning is dominant, some deviation from standard uses in the other linguistic systems (grammar, lexis) is inevitable. (Author/CK)

Study investigated the effects of retelling practice sessions on the prose comprehension of fourth grade proficient and less proficient readers. For four sessions, they read silently, rendered free recall, then retold if desired. Researcher assessments indicated such practice in retelling caused significant improvements in quantity and quality of…

Describes a simple eight-step technique for teaching poetry that introduces poetry from the standpoint of writing it and by changing prose to poetry. (SR)

Two experiments with 112 college students investigated how subjects might modulate their reading strategies as a function of how they expect to be tested. Test-expectancy subjects, regardless of the test expected, are more apt to identify and focus on important information than are subjects without a specific test expectancy. (SLD)

Five adult day-care clients (average age 66) read passages using Question Answering Reading (QAR) for 6 weeks; 5 read passages normally. QAR produced more social interaction and better comprehension and retention, both when the researcher and when a staff member served as group leader. (SK)

This paper investigates the use of multi-word sequences in two important university registers: classroom teaching and textbooks. Following Biber et al. (1999), we take a frequency driven approach to the identification of multi-word sequences, referred to as "lexical bundles". We compare the lexical bundles in classroom teaching and textbooks to…

Although many studies have been undertaken by literary critics and stylisticians on African English literary texts generally and Nigerian English prose fiction specifically, there has been little or no analysis of dialogue and discourse in such texts. An examination of the phenomenon of speech as manifested in conversational pieces in Nigerian…

Notes that the past twenty-five years have seen the evolution of works written for blacks hampered by the opinion of a white audience. There is an attempt to abandon the conventions of standard English writing, and poetry leaves the sanctuary of the classroom and takes to the streets where it is welcomed. (Author/AM)

This booklet describes and discusses a method for determining the readability level of prose passages in reading materials for children. The method discussed in the booklet assigns a value to each noun in selected passages on the basis of its frequency level on standard word-frequency charts, correlated in a number of studies with independent…

A two-experiment study investigated the possible contribution of prose-relevant pictures to the recall and retention of information presented in written prose materials with older learners as subjects. In the first experiment subjects were 52 graduate students from a southeastern university. Recall of information presented in written prose…