A schools council study concludes that: secondary students are not being taught to read thoughtfully, texts and worksheets are too difficult, insufficient time is allotted to silent reading, and reading comprehension should not be taught as a discrete skill. The SRA Reading Laboratories are suggested as one tactic for improvement. (SJL)

Two studies utilized different conditions under which kindergarten children encountered the same narrative material and were tested for recall at 30 seconds and one week after the encounters. Children who enacted the story while hearing it significantly recalled more narrative content and implicit and explicit information. (DS)

Twenty audiotapes, containing lies or true statements, were recorded and judged by 100 subject-listeners, aged 15-30. As a group, subjects displayed better-than-chance accuracy in judging veracity, which confirms previous studies. A tentative profile is drawn of an individual adept at detecting lies. (SJL)

Discusses a study that explored the effect of a guided reading strategy on the short- and long-term comprehension of disadvantaged students in a seventh-grade geography class. (DD)

Discusses the utilization of songs to improve the pronunciation, listening comprehension, and grammar of second language learners. (CFM)

In a replication of two studies, the author found that sixth and eighth graders performed comparably to their counterparts of 60 years ago on reading comprehension and vocabulary tests. (MKM)

Proposes a method for teaching listening comprehension skills to students of French in Canada by incorporating Quebec phonetics in a standard French phonological component. (AM)

It takes special skills to "read" math. Zero in on math symbols, vocabulary and comprehension with an activity/game center. (Editor)

Acquisition of the words "this" and "that" was tested by a comprehension and a production task with children aged 4 and 7. It was confirmed that children would learn the spatial contrast between the words and apply it from the speakers viewpoint; non-egocentrism was not deemed necessary for correct use. (CHK)

In Part I, three aspects of cloze tests are examined: placement, measuring achievement, and evaluation. In Part II, it is shown how original texts and textbook texts are prepared for different forms of the cloze test. (Text is in German. (IFS/WGA)

Moderately mentally retarded children can acquire the necessary basic mental operations through a proper progression of mediated learning experiences; once the basic mental operations have been acquired, complex learning can occur because the necessary cognitive tools are present. (JD)

Asserts that it is important to develop a fast rate of reading, discusses how children remain slow readers for years after they have learned about letters and sounds, argues that there is no need for even a beginning reader to read slowly, and proposes some methods to improve reading. (Author/JM)

Discusses how the use of video media as a mode of language presentation influences the definition, purpose, and research agenda of a second-language listening comprehension instrument. Video media is used as an umbrella phrase to describe the cluster of media in which dynamic visual elements are blended with auditory elements to create a whole…

This study investigated the need to include explicit attributional retraining in a program designed to teach self-regulation reading comprehension strategies to 60 Spanish children (grades 5-6) with learning disabilities. Regardless of attributional retraining, children improved on measures of cognitive strategies, but their gains were very low on…

To explore the potential learner benefits of early exposure to literature and suggest instructional guidelines for effective literature study at the beginning level, this article examines the nature of literature and surveys how current textbooks guide beginning learners to access literary works. (Author/JL)