Examines the impact of the traditional form of reading instruction on the reading attitudes and perceptions of the reading process of 467 elementary school children. Compares children taught traditionally and children who received no formal reading instruction. Finds that reading attitudes and perceptions of the reading process were affected by…

Data from a study on second-language reading comprehension show that assessment task type, language of assessment, and target language experience uniformly affect learners' ability to demonstrate their reading comprehension. A literature review is included. (Contains 57 references.) (LB)

Notes that, although traditionally most of the research into nonlinear systems has been related to research in the physical sciences, recently new ideas involving chaos have been developed in the social sciences. Discusses chaos theory for reading and literacy research. (RS)

Addresses myth that children can comprehend text simply because they can decode the words in it. Provides evidence to support claim that developing readers benefit from explicit teaching of comprehension strategies via direct explanation and modeling of strategies. (Author/JDM)

Identifies five phases of development to distinguish the course of word reading; notes each phase is characterized by students' working knowledge of the alphabetic system, which is central for acquiring word reading skill. Explains the usefulness of this information for teachers of problem readers. Explains the processes that students acquire in…

Introduces the articles in this special issue. Reviews research on linguistic processes in reading across orthographies. Concludes that these articles contribute to the understanding of factors affecting development of efficient reading in first and second languages; they also help to ameliorate the relative silence in the reading literature about…

College students (n=24) read passages marked for think-aloud (TA) procedure, not marked for TA, and control (no TA). The marked procedure elicited more veridical protocols, and students who scored high on the comprehension test were more likely to have made many TA comments reflecting a knowledge-transforming approach to the text. (SLD)

Introduces a special section of this journal devoted to discussing the implications for secondary schools of understanding reading comprehension as a social act. Argues that, to be effective, comprehension instruction in middle and secondary classrooms must accommodate the particular influences of particular sociohistorical contexts on reading…

Finds layout of a list affects the way it is read and understood; recall for separately arranged lists in text was better than that for continuously arranged lists, and notes a difference in reading patterns between the two layouts; and a separated list allowed readers to reread the points selectively, while a continuous list made readers reread…

Reviews prominent reading theories in light of their accounts of how automatic and control processes combine to produce successful text comprehension, and the trade-offs between the two. Presents the Compensatory-Encoding Model of reading, which explicates how, when, and why automatic and control processes interact. Notes important educational…

The Language Vocabulary Acquisition Approach (LVA) to Reading Instruction is a revolutionary new approach to reading instruction for emergent and developing readers in urban settings. The Approach quickly immerses young urban children into print text, bombarding them with a preponderance of words, ideas and general understandings about their…

Recent eye movement experiments offer preliminary evidence that skilled readers activate word-level prosodic information when silently reading sentences. This paper reviews the role of eye movements during reading as well as the preliminary evidence for prosodic processing. A new experiment examines whether prosodic processing differs for high and…

We used Barton and Sanford's (1993) anomaly detection task to investigate text processing differences between skilled and less-skilled readers. The results of 2 experiments showed that many readers had the tendency to process text in a shallow or incomplete manner, frequently failing to detect anomalous nouns or noun phrases (NPs) in text such as…

In this article, we articulate the critical differences between memory-based processing and explanation-based processing. We suggest that the most important claim of memory-based text processing is that the automatic processes that function with respect to text processing are all applications of ordinary memory processes. This claim contrasts with…

In recent years, memory-based and explanation-based theories have dominated the discourse processing literature. Numerous studies have been conducted to show support for each of the two views. Most of these studies have manipulated factors in the episodic memory trace of texts, without a great deal of focus on how general world knowledge impacts…