A study was conducted to explore readers' ability to identify information of high and low importance. Specifically, the study explored (1) whether the ability to prioritize or structure information in texts was consonant with proficient reading, (2) whether the ability to prioritize information from texts was dependent upon the memory capacity…

This paper is based on a transactional viewpoint (involving writer, reader, and text) in which the text is no longer external but is constructed and reconstructed by the reader during reading. Using a database developed for a previous study (Goodman and Goodman, 1978), this research examined pronoun usage in three basal texts by evaluating the…

How writers come by, find, or create their sense of purpose and whether readers are at all aware of or affected by this purposeful, sometimes elaborate rhetorical structure the writer labored to construct are questions that have motivated critical discussions of the construction of purpose. Using think-aloud protocols, the construction of purpose…

A study was conducted to determine how a reader identifies and represents the major topics in a text and their interrelationships. Subjects, 56 college students, read two texts one sentence at a time. Each text contained 12 paragraphs that discussed six attributes of two major topics. The paragraphs on one text were organized by attribute, while…

Noting that readability formulas are strictly text-based and therefore do not reflect the interactive nature of the reading process, this paper argues that many of the instructional material evaluations for which such formulas are used are inappropriate and offers more reader-based alternatives to the use of formulas. The first half of the paper…

The acquisition of visual information, which occurs during eye fixations, involves two processes: registration (visual information becoming available to the brain) and utilization (visual information being used to further text comprehension). Registration occurs at the beginning of a fixation, while at least four possible patterns describe the…

A study investigated the effect on reading comprehension of using semantic impressions as a previewing activity to provide an overall impression of a story's structure. Subjects, 31 eighth grade remedial reading students from a suburban junior high school, were divided into two groups: a treatment group that received semantic impressions as a…

One of the most consistent findings of research on discourse is that important text information is better learned than less important information because readers devote more attention to the important information. There is now very good reason to believe that questions cause readers to attend selectively to question-relevant information and that a…

A study was conducted to define the linguistic and discourse parameters of text difficulty from the point of view of both the reader and the text in order to redefine readability and to provide an operational way of explaining processing difficulties of the near-mature reader. Subjects were 14-year-old students in the United States and the United…

Naturalistic inquiry (based on the ethnographic research paradigm) has the potential to supplement, or possibly to replace, quantitative experimental research in education. For years most reading researchers have used the experimental research design. This design fails to tap self-concept, value systems, purpose of and attitude toward reading,…

Strategies used by English as second language readers to reconstruct an interrupted line of meaning were investigated using a cloze procedure in which selected words were replaced by nonsense words. The test was administered to 39 adults enrolled in intensive intermediate and advanced level English classes. The students were required to identify…

Based on an extensive review of literature on the depth of comprehension approach, a study was conducted to induce various degrees of depth of processing at the semantic inferential level through orientation tasks. It was hypothesized that the most superficial reading would occur for "error correction" and the deepest reading would be done for…

It was the purpose of this study to compare the concepts of reading given by children defined as "good" readers and "poor" readers. (Author)

A brief discussion on how pictures are related to written text. (HB)

This paper describes a computational approach to certain problems of anaphora in natural language and argues in favor of formal meaning representation languages (MRLs) for natural language. After presenting arguments in favor of formal meaning representation languages, appropriate MRLs are discussed. Minimal requirements include provisions for…