This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 25 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effect of reading ability, mode of presentation, and passage familiarity on the general and precise comprehension of expository text; (2) a constructivist…

Working on the theory that intonation miscues caused by confusion over punctuation and other phrase boundaries will make the apprehension of text more difficult than necessary for young developing readers, a study reviewed the research and literature relevant to the effects of location of punctuation, phrasing, and line breaks in text and on the…

This curriculum guide suggests activities for teaching basic reading skills to elementary school students. The activities are grouped according to six major skill areas: reading readiness, word recognition, word analysis, word meaning, content reading, and reading comprehension. Within each group, the activities are listed according to the grade…

Increased public concern about students' basic skill levels and about the need for minimum-competency tests has placed part of the responsibility for reading-skills development on content-area teachers. This annotated bibliography is a resource guide for content-area teachers who want to integrate reading-skills instruction with their subject…

A battery of reading tests designed to identify the component skills involved in reading comprehension was administered to 624 sixth grade students in the metropolitan Sydney (Australia) schools. Factor analysis of the data showed that knowledge of word meanings, sentence comprehension, and semantic context are experimentally identifiable…

Some basic pattern-analyzing functions that occur during the reading process are described in this paper. The functions deal mainly with the analysis of typographical factors such as word shape, spacing, and orientation, but they also interact with contextual variables. The research interpreted in the paper proposes an attentional model of reading…

This paper discusses some specific issues about testing and relates the discussion to reading teachers and reading instruction. The issues that are discussed include the goals, criteria, and methods of classroom assessment. The paper concludes that teachers need to learn more about the process of assessment in order to use tests effectively, and…

Language development and dialect are measures of influences upon a student's ability to learn to read. It has been observed that students whose language differs from that used in schools and in the materials of instruction are often found in remedial reading classes. Their difficulty lies in attempting to learn to read a language which is…

Being able to read literary works in the target foreign language with good understanding of the content should be a goal for students in a basic language program. This paper explores the issue as to when students should begin to read literature that has not been simplified for the language learner and looks specifically at the use of unadapted…

The survival of black public school teachers is contingent upon significant improvement in their performance on the National Teacher Examination (NTE). The soundest way to improve their performance is to improve the educational program in the black colleges and universities where the teachers are trained. As open admissions institutions, it is the…

Two experiments assessed the effects of text cohesion and schema availability on sixth grade children's comprehension of social studies passages that varied in vocabulary difficulty. The purpose of the experiments was to test the compensation hypothesis within the interactive theory of reading, which assumes that reading involves many…

Questioning the process by which language minority students are taught literacy in the United States, this paper argues that language skills, including reading, should not be taught in isolation, and that learning, not literacy, should be the guiding force for educators. The paper first discusses the special reading problems of the language…

A study was conducted to determine if increasing the redundancy of sections in scientific articles where typical readers became bored or confused would have a desirable effect on other readers. Undergraduate journalism students applied R. F. Carter's signalled stopping technique to two different science articles by indicating points where they…

Effects of embedded (appropriately positioned within text) and intact (outline format) headings on the processing of ecological and geological text material were examined in two separate studies. Suggesting that outlines may provide readers with global information about a passage and that embedded headings may aid in discovering relationships…

The reading improvement activities in this handbook are intended for use by middle school science teachers. Focusing on study skills, vocabulary development, and comprehension development, the activities include (1) surveying science texts and science content area reading materials, (2) outlining, (3) spelling, (4) syllabication, (5) word…