Literature can play a prominent part in revitalizing the teaching of English because it can provide students with both immediate and future rewards. As an immediate reward, literature allows students to imaginatively experience situations which they have not yet encountered. It thus acts acts as a liberating force for young people from the…

This paper discusses discourse comprehension with respect to individual differences. First, some general principles of discourse structure and the processing of discourse are presented. These principles emphasize the role of sentence and thematic structure. Second, possible sources of individual differences in discourse processing are discussed.…

Developing prerequisite learning skills and strategies and providing knowledge necessary to further learning in a particular discipline are the dual roles of a middle-grade content-area teacher. This paper demonstrates how these dual roles can support each other in developing readiness for learning. The importance of readiness for learning is…

This study investigated the effects of the direction of print on learning-disabled students' and normal students' abilities to learn the sequence in which sentences are presented, to comprehend sentences, and to recognize relationships among sentences. Four groups of 12 learning-disabled pupils and four groups of 12 normal pupils between the ages…

Materials for teaching reading comprehension in a widely used intermediate grade basal reading series were analyzed as part of a larger study. This report concentrates on the genre of the selections and on the sequencing of instruction in questions related to the comprehension skill, drawing conclusions. Results of the analyses suggested that the…

This study attempted to prove a dichotomy between cognitive processes as measured by Piagetian reasoning tasks and those measured by traditional intelligence tests. A battery of tests (Slosson Intelligence Test, Durrell's Silent Reading and Listening Comprehension Test, Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices, and the Piagetian Measure of Cognitive…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between eye voice span (EVS), reading ability, and readability. Fifty average and poor third, fourth, and fifth-grade students were selected on the basis of their comprehension scores on the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test. They were individually tested for EVS on paragraphs ranging in…

This study focuses on the relationship between blending ability and reading comprehension among 80 prereading children from three private preschools. Three methods of instruction were tested: One group was instructed with an auditory method; the second group was instructed with an auditory-visual method; and the third group practiced the basic set…

This study examines, through the use of a group screening instrument, the oral language comprehension skills of elementary school children. The screening instrument was composed of 60 experimental sentences of varying syntactic complexity. Each sentence contained a specific function word or combination of function words which conveyed a direction…

This annotated bibliography, intended for researchers and teachers, lists materials about reading while listening. The entries are organized into five sections: materials for reading while listening, descriptions and assessments of reading-while-listening methods, empirical studies of reading-while-listening methods, theoretical issues related to…

This article describes discursive functions in the three major areas of non-literary written communication: (1) official or personal correspondence; (2) technical reading or editing; and (3) the press. Illocutionary acts are examined under their three aspects: graphic, lexical, enunciative. This description is intended to result in training…

In a study designed to discover whether interest in reading materials influenced a student's comprehension, 47 seventh grade students, reading one to two grade levels below their grade placement, were assigned a self selected story of high interest and a story of low interest. The 12 short story selections were assembled on the basis of research…

The purpose of this review article is to survey some of the current research in linguistic syntax and the reading process. It also presents a summary of recent developments in applied linguistics. Reading comprehension is viewed as an interactive communication process where the reader uses his knowledge and cognitive-linguistic processes,…

This paper describes the rationale and strategies of a language teaching approach found to have been extremely effective with both adult and child learners. This approach does not require the language learner to speak until he feels comfortable doing so. Both past and current applications of a delayed oral practice approach to language learning…

A study was made of the importance to reading comprehension of using the author's top-level organization or textual schema. The subjects, 102 ninth graders with high, average, and low reading comprehension scores, read expository passages, some of which included signals explicitly stating the top-level organizational structure and some of which…