Borrows Robertson Davies definition of "fifth business": roles in a drama that are neither heroine nor hero but are necessary nevertheless to carry out the denouement. Suggests that reading may be seen as a play in which there is some fifth business without which the reading process cannot fully happen. Uses a variety of typefaces. (TB)

Reviews problems with the constructionist view of comprehension, often based on schema theories, in light of evidence suggesting that bottom-up processes are predominant in comprehension. Reports on three alternative views of the role of top-down processing in comprehension. Proposes that some elements of schema theory remain important to…

Gives a brief history of miscue analysis, and then describes miscue analysis procedures, how to code and analyze miscues, and the reader's knowledge of the language cuing systems. Includes an appendix of markings for miscue analysis. (SR)

Examined children's modification of their own retrieval processes in a cued recall task. Results suggested that monitoring and modification of retrieval processes should be distinguished and that monitoring is necessary but not sufficient for induction of an effective retrieval strategy. Results also had implications for understanding children's…

Investigates effects of epistemological beliefs and topic-specific beliefs on undergraduates' (N=40) cognitive and strategic processing of a dual-positional text. Findings reveal that epistemological beliefs about the speed of learning affected the overall number of cognitive processes exhibited, whereas topic-specific beliefs interacted with the…

Finds that: sentence reading times were facilitated during rereading to the extent that the information had been encoded from the initial reading; participants incorporated new information into their text representations; rereading improved the memory for causally important information; and the correlation between recall and importance was greater…

Describes development and validation of a new self-report instrument, the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory, designed to assess adolescent and adult readers' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies while reading academic materials. After a brief review of the literature, the development and validation…

This review of research focuses on three issues in reading development: (1) the relationship of phonemic awareness to the variance in reading development not accounted for by rapid naming; (2) the relationship of rapid naming to the variance not accounted for by phonemic awareness; and (3) whether phonemic awareness and rapid naming contribute…

Applies the reader response theory of literary critic Wolfgang Iser to the reading of Chris Crutcher's novel "Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes." Examines both the reader's engagement with the novel and Eric Calhoune's engagement with the world of Sarah Byrnes. (RS)

Investigated the interaction between morphological, orthographic, and phonological information in reading Chinese compound words in five sets of experiments, using both masked priming and visual-visual priming lexical decision tasks. (Author/VWL)

Examines the proposal that orthographic processing in reading polysyllabic words takes place via an analysis of the word into an orthographic/morphological structure called the basic orthographic syllabic structure (BOSS). Three experiments are reported demonstrating that whether the BOSS division is faster than the syllable division depends…

This study examined rapid orthographic learning following silent reading in third-grade children as a function of number of target nonword repetitions and test delay. In each of two test sessions at least 6 days apart, children read a series of short stories, with each story containing a different nonword repeated either four or eight times. In…

Two studies investigated the ability to use contextual information in stories to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary by 9-10-year-olds with good and poor reading comprehension. Across studies, children with poor reading comprehension were impaired when the processing demands of the task were greatest. In Study 2, working memory capacity was…

Although knowledge-based inferences (Graesser, Singer, & Trabasso, 1994) depend on general knowledge, there may be differences across knowledge areas in how they support these processes. This study explored processing differences between 2 areas of knowledge (physical cause?effect vs. goals and planning) to establish (a) that each would support…

Two experiments were conducted to understand the processes through which 5th graders discriminate relevant from irrelevant information when solving mathematical story problems. Visual scanning was recorded and coded as directed toward relevant information, irrelevant information, the question, workspace, and elsewhere. Experiment 1 focused on the…