Teaching students to become readers who can work with an author to "build" a text requires a better understanding of the nature of the author-reader relationship. This essay discusses the rights and responsibilities of that relationship by presenting writing and reading as a rhetorical situation--an interaction between author,…

Both psychologists and reading specialists have been interested in whether words are processed letter by letter or in larger units. A reaction time paradigm was used to evaluate these options with interest focused on potential units of word recognition which might be functional within single syllable words. The basic paradigm involved presenting…

Discusses how to help children understand the reading process instead of simply recalling information. Presents two instructional strategies which help children learn metacomprehension. (MM)

Prepositions and verb aspect help guide narrative comprehension by indicating the parts of motion events that are most prominent. Grammatical categories that are important for conveying event structure also help construct a mental model of the events of the narrative. (SED)

Six common visual dysfunctions are briefly explained and their relationships to reading noted: (1) ametropia, refractive error; (2) inaccurate saccades, the small jumping eye movements used in reading; (3) inefficient binocularity/fusion; (4) insufficient convergence/divergence; (5) heterophoria, imbalance in extra-ocular muscles; and (6)…

It is the transformation and fusion of the reader and text into something greater than each alone that makes reading a mysterious, visionary process. (HOD)

Papers by Morrison, Siegel and Ryan, and Stanovich are critically reviewed with comments on both theoretical and empirical issues associated with alternative explanations of word decoding deficiencies in poor readers. Similarities and differences in theoretical perspectives are noted, but convergence in definition of problem areas and research…

Author discusses the many methods and approaches in teaching reading and concludes that it is the teacher that makes the difference. (MB)

The articles in this section describe research on reading in areas of visual persistence, letter identification, letter probability, word superiority effect, proofreader errors and order effects. This review challenges fellow basic researchers to become more aware of the components of reading before adding new data purporting to delineate the…

Offers a tentative definition of reading comprehension, based on contemporary work in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology; invites response and criticism. (MKM)

Notes that, since fictional discourse need not reflect prevailing systems of meaning and norms or values, readers gain detachment from their own presuppositions; by constituting and formulating text-sense, readers are constituting and formulating their own cognition and becoming aware of the operations for doing so. (FL)

Demonstrates how reading differs in code and channel from other modes of learning, and how learning from print differs from learning from other media. (DD)

Describes the steps in the natural process through which children use their syntactic, semantic, and phonological systems in learning to read. (DD)

Proposes, as a follow-up to a previous article about applying a phonological reading model to technical communication, that educators and practitioners of technical communication would benefit from a thorough understanding of the speech instinct. Explores the speech instinct, how humans developed it, and how it has been and still is fostered by…

Examines the extent to which low- and high-WMC (working memory capacity) readers adjust cognitive processes to fit the reading purpose. When reading to study, low-WMC readers emphasized less demanding processes over more demanding processes to a greater extent than high-WMC readers and recalled less. When reading for entertainment, patterns of…