Cognitive psychology, which investigates how people learn and how people know, can aid writers, who want readers to read their material easily, understand the material, or comprehend the material--three levels of processing complexity. Because readers vary from being very knowledgeable in the subject of a document to lacking in knowledge, and…

Theoretical issues related to the parallel role of internal revision in reading and writing are explored in this paper, which explains that meanings generated during reading or writing are always tentative and that readers and writers must build and maintain a continuous text world. The paper next examines criteria for evaluating the continuity of…

Arguing that teachers need to provide direct instruction if they expect children to learn to apply semantic or syntactic clues as they are reading, this paper presents a variety of activities for teaching children to use context clues. Among the more than 35 activities described are: gathering clues from pictures, using a language experience…

The reader response criticism that has arisen in direct response to the New Criticism can be adapted to the needs of the developing writer through its emphasis upon the experience of the reader engaged with the text. The reader response approach generates content--helps the developing writer find something to say--and facilitates the process…

Three experiments were conducted to determine whether an instructional set for visual imagery would facilitate reading comprehension of elementary school children. In the first experiment, 38 fifth graders randomly assigned to experimental and control groups were given the Durrell-Sullivan Reading Capacity and Achievement tests after the…

A study explored the effects of prequestions (questions provided prior to reading) and the influence of a prediction strategy upon the amount and types of information recalled by children in grades three through six. Subjects, 188 students in grades three through six who were reading at third grade level or above, read a 900-word expository…

The efficient reader constructs tentative hypotheses about the meaning of the text that has been read and about the content yet to come. The hypotheses remain tentative until all related information has been accounted for. The reader then constructs a model that considers all of the details in a text. If a promising interpretation fails to account…

Pronouns, substitutes, elipses, conjunctions, synonyms, antonyms, superordinates and subordinates, and part-whole relations all provide cohesive ties that help a reader understand text. A study at Britain's Open University (England) has revealed the way in which the perception of cohesive ties is achieved as children's reading ability grows.…

Behaviorism cannot adequately explain language processing. A synthesis of the psycholinguistic and information processing approaches of cognitive psychology, however, can provide the basis for a speculative analysis of reading, if this synthesis is tempered by a perceptual learning theory of uncertainty reduction. Theorists of information…

Encompassing his work in the psycholinguistics of reading, this book presents Kenneth Goodman's major papers focusing on miscue analysis, the theoretical model of the reading processes derived from it, and relevant research perspectives. Following an introduction to Goodman's works, the articles discuss the following topics: (1) the reading…

Noting that in recent years testing has fallen into disrepute, this paper demonstrates how the construction, use, and validation of tests, if adequately conceived, can increase the level of knowledge about the intricate nature of the reading processes. The first section of the paper discusses the measurement process and the process of test…

Reviews the literature on cultural and social influences affecting student's ability to read. (RB)

Sixty tenth graders participated in this study of relationships between eye/voice span, phrase and clause boundaries, reading ability, and sentence structure. Results indicated that sentences apparently are "chunked" into surface constituents during processing. Better tenth grade readers had longer eye/voice spans than did poorer readers and…

This study examines the stages of information processing during a single eye fixation, by overloading or disrupting short-term memory. Ten navy enlistees identified tones that were emitted at sporadic times, while they read general-interest passages through an eye view monitor. Each trial ended with a ten-item test to ensure that all subjects…

This paper reviews theories of transfer of learning to determine whether they offer guidelines for educational approaches. Two classes of theories are described. The first class of theories is based on the notion that the conditions for transfer are established when an original learning event and a transfer event share common stimulus properties.…