A study explored how cognitive mapping assists college students in gathering information from long prose passages and organizing this information for subsequent writing. Mapping is a prewriting technique in which students develop a cognitive scheme or graphic representation of a text, which reduces memory load and facilitates integration and…

In recent characterizations of reading and writing, the distinctions melt into each other so that one definition serves for both: both are the creation of meaning. In the act of creating meaning, readers become writers and writers become readers. While reading is primarily receptive and writing is primarily productive, fluency in reading is very…

Several aspects of the relationship between reading and technology are presented that have special relevance to those individuals who feel responsible for aspects of contemporary education. Five main points are covered: (1) technological innovations as they affect reading are essentially extensions of the sensory and kinesthetic abilities of human…

To test three specific hypotheses about recall as a function of four categories of logical relations, a study was done to determine whether logical relations systems of prose analysis can be used to predict recall. Two descriptive passages of naturally occurring expository prose were used. Each text was parsed into 45 statements, consisting of…

The readings in this collection were prepared to accompany a report of a series of experiments conducted to determine what information readers, both skilled adults and children beginning to read, use when they read to understand a story. Titles of the readings are are (1) "Oral Reading: Does It Reflect Decoding or Comprehension?" (2)…

This study is the ninth in a series of reports from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. This report focuses on ways in which broadly-based cultural and institutional factors silently influence students' reading and writing behaviors.…

A discussion of authentic instructional materials for the business German classroom examines the reasons for using such materials, and focuses on reading strategies to be used with authentic German texts. Authentic materials' advantages include their communicative function, their intended use by a real audience, and their specific form. It is…

The Wisconsin Rural Reading Improvement Project implements a research-based telecommunications model of professional development and school improvement that rural school districts can use when redesigning K-12 reading curriculum. The project's approach to staff development assumes that change in school reading programs proceeds via extensive…

Conference presentations of research on reading comprehension, reading instruction, computer applications in reading instruction, and reading theory are compiled in this yearbook. Titles and authors of some of the articles are as follows: "A Rationale for Teaching Children with Limited English Proficiency" (M. Zintz); "Preliminary Development of a…

A case study addressed (1) the relationship between language ability and the use of top-level organizational strategies that focus on the macrostructure of written text, and (2) the comparative use of these strategies when reading expository texts in native language (L1) and second language (L2). Subjects were five Hispanic English as a second…

Four studies used the theoretically based understanding of comprehension developed by W. Kintsch and T. A. van Dijk to look for processes that might undergo development as a child becomes more practiced and skilled in reading so that an understanding of these processes might become the basis for reading remediation programs. The first three…

A study was conducted to determine if interest in a basal reader story could be heightened and reading comprehension improved by (1) having the children predict the story content from the title prior to reading the story and (2) having them predict the outcome of the story at a salient midpoint. Subjects, 45 children in 2 fifth grade classes, were…

A study was conducted to determine whether word length and sentence position influence the likelihood that a child will acknowledge that a word has disrupted comprehension of a reading passage. In the first task, third and fifth grade skilled and less-skilled readers read 16 short paragraphs containing nonsense words and reported whether the…

Since the time of E. B. Huey (1908), there have been clear indicators that oral language as a reflection of a child's linguistic ability has been clearly related to his or her reading achievement or comprehension. P. McKee (1937) and W. S. Gray (1937) both speculated that reading difficulties might parallel language deficiencies. G. Hildreth…

There are two disconcerting aspects of the research studies selected and discussed in the publication "Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading" (1985). One is the kinds of reading materials that were designated as sources for meeting the various functions of reading; the other is the omission of the role of…