While the look-say versus the phonics controversy has existed for years in reading instruction, a similar debate regarding spelling instruction is only now emerging out of the literature and into the hands of the classroom teacher. "Subskill" spelling, most frequently found in current spelling programs, presumes that good spelling is achieved by…

The issue addressed in this paper is the relationship between form in fictional prose and form in other uses of language, particularly those uses important in composition theory. Form in composition theory has traditionally had two ways of identifying units of analysis: (1) the sentence and semantic units, and (2) pragmatic and rhetorical units.…

An informal study examined the impact of a simple behavior modification procedure on the reading habits of second and fifth grade students. Behavior modification theory was pared down to two rules ("reinforce proper behavior" and "reinforce anything close to proper behavior") so that no additional burdens would be placed on…

A study was conducted to describe and compare the oral responses of three adolescents to two short stories and two textbook selections and to identify their general expectations for reading and responding to fiction and exposition. Three tenth grade girls were interviewed about their family lives, interests, preferences for and experiences with…

Intended for teachers interested in integrating computers into a reading curriculum, this paper analyzes three computer adventure games and suggests applications of each game within the reading class. Beginning with definitions of the concepts of reading, comprehension, and adventure game, the paper then describes the three games:…

A study using a biasing paradigm examined four hypotheses regarding specific mechanisms thought to underlie the Assimilation-plus-Correction (A-C) theory of schema-text interactions. According to this theory, the ideas implied by a schema (type-1 ideas) are thought to be assimilated and obscured, while those ideas representing novel information…

Two views of the sources of poor reading comprehension are currently distinguishable in the research literature: a decoding sufficiency view and a comprehension skills view. The decoding sufficiency view argues that decoding is the only skill that must be acquired for general language comprehension. The broader, comprehension skills hypothesis…

This final report on the relationship between orthographic characteristics and reading behavior consists of five chapters. The first chapter examines writing in its variety of forms in different cultures, noting that such differences can provide important clues to how the brain processes visual information. The second chapter addresses the issue…

Thirty-six college students read a portion of a contemporary novel presented on a cathode ray tube while their eye movements were being monitored and recorded in an effort to determine how soon after the onset of a fixation during reading the mind begins to deal with characteristics of the language being perceived. The passage contained a total of…

In order to investigate the effect of experimenter-controlled reading speeds on the literal comprehension of multilevel reading passages and to assess the effects of operant-regulated, or self-regulated, conditions on reading speed, these two studies sampled a total of 400 eighth graders. Two passages, originally written at the eighth-grade level,…

Separate listings of both ongoing and completed reading research in Great Britain between 1974 and 1977--including relevant language studies and research on spelling--are arranged alphabetically by researcher, reporting the research title, the institution at which the research was conducted, the years started and completed, and the type of…

This study discusses the importance of comprehension in reading and describes a tool for measuring reading comprehension according to an individual reader's "structures of meaning." The procedure for developing a visual representation of this structure involves three distinct steps. After reading the text, student and teacher employ techniques,…

Two experiments examined proofreading errors to test whether reading is mediated by a phonological recoding stage. In the first experiment, 162 undergraduates circled the misspelled words in a text as the experimenter read the passage aloud. In the second experiment, 165 undergraduates corrected misspellings as they read the same passage silently,…

This study examined the value of the Read-Encode-Annotate-Ponder (REAP) procedure as a teaching/learning strategy, focusing on its use of written annotations designed to achieve specific learning objectives. Subjects were 105 students in six college reading/study skills classes who were assigned to one of three treatment conditions: the…