This paper presents a survey of scientific research, professional literature, and doctoral dissertations on reading comprehension done from 1948 to 1972. The following reading factors believed to affect reading comprehension were identified: fate, vocabulary, sentence structure, questioning, and purpose setting. The research pertaining to the…

The Syntactic Density Score (SDS) is designed to determine the syntactic density of the oral and written discourse of students in grades 1-14, as well as that of reading materials selected for students. The SDS can be hand tabulated; however, a computer program is available which can determine the score from any corpus of material typed into the…

Rhetoric is the most important of the writer's tools, and structure in writing is not being taught in the classroom. Structures of writing are the archetypal patterns of perception and grow out of the very structure of the human mind. Structure is imposed on the writer who wants to communicate by the reader's capacity to perceive. The analytical…

This study examined the effects of two instructional practices on cognitive response to three sonnets at the sense level of comprehension. The subjects were twelfth grade students in an elective English program who had not had work in poetry that year before the experiment. One teaching method dealt with morphological, lexical, and syntactical…

This reference grammar provides extensive analysis and examples of the Czech language. The introductory section discusses general concepts concerning speech and language, Czech dialectology, linguistic analysis, stylistics, grammar, and diachronic linguistics. The major sections include phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax. Several…

The purpose of this investigation was to compare the effects on achievement and attitude of a method of teaching using multi-media self-instructional learning activity packages, with the conventional method of teaching by lecture and discussion. The subjects were 126 community college students enrolled in remedial English classes. Two instructors…

This book represents, in part, the written record of the "Linguistic Symposium of Romance Languages: Application of Generative Grammar to Their Description and Teaching," held at the University of Florida, Gainesville, in February 1971. The aim of the Symposium was to bring forth contributions in the description of Romance languages, to draw…

This syntactic study of French emphasizes analysis of the theory underlying the actual description of the language and techniques used in the derivation of the theory. The work, containing four major sections, includes: (1) a guide to base components, (2) symbolic notation, (3) grammar, and (4) transformations. Grammatical rules for "syntagmes,"…

This third section of the research project, "The Syntax of Contemporary Brazilian Portuguese," presents a descriptive and historical survey of the evolution of the language. Included in the work are: (1) a summary of historical concern with this subject reflecting literary and linguistic interest, (2) classification and discussion of…

This paper examines the semantic and structural characteristics of a basic pattern in English and discusses Spanish equivalents. A sentence-by-sentence analysis is made with consideration of transformations on the basic patterns in both languages. Translation and transformation complications in the two languages are illustrated. The equivalence…

Four Negro children's (two average and two slow readers) oral reading was taped at eight regular intervals during their second and third year of reading instruction in order to analyze their oral reading miscues and to discover any developmental changes. Retelling of stories read was also taped to measure comprehension. The miscues were analyzed…

Bilingual education programs for Mexican-American preschool and elementary grade pupils almost invariably include some type of instruction in English as a second language (ESL). Usual ESL Programs for young Spanish-speaking children are found to emphasize pronunciation drill (minimal-a pair drills: pit-bit, choose-shoes). An alternative approach…

This report considers the problem of constructing an abstract model of story comprehension. The use of questions that go beyond the story as a test of understanding the story raises a methodological problem which is discussed in detail. (Author)

The language a child learns from and attends to is the speech of significant persons in his world, addressed to each other and to him. As the child gradually participates in this social interaction he learns communicative competence, i.e., the nonconscious, tacit knowledge that underlies speech behavior--knowledge of both the language and the…

The report describes the Classroom Information and Computing Service (CLICS), a pedagogical computer-based information system that is used as a case study in the subject "Information Systems" in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering at M.I.T. CLICS is an abstraction of the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service (MULTICS) that is being…