Described are the comprehension monitoring abilities of science students when reading science textbooks. The incorrect use of schemata and the limiting influence of metacognitive abilities on the improvement of meaningful learning is discussed. (KR)

Discusses what research says about silent and oral reading and the implications this has for reading instruction and instruction in the content areas. States that students are more attentive during silent reading and participate more in follow-up discussions of silent reading than in oral reading. (MG)

Reports on an English-for-special-purposes (ESP) reading project that emphasizes the role of content comprehension. The project results suggest that the content comprehension approach can improve reading comprehension as well as knowledge of reading grammar and general reading ability. (45 references) (GLR)

Twenty-eight middle school students with dyslexia read literature daily using a computer-based reading system. Seventy percent of the students read with greater comprehension. Fourteen percent showed lower comprehension scores, perhaps associated with kinesthetic motor weakness. The system did not provide a positive remediation benefit incremental…

Data from Think Aloud protocols were used to determine how two groups of adult subjects approached reading. Analysis indicates that vocabulary proficiency has a power impact on psychological processing of second-language reading by novices but also that culturally determined literacy practices may be a factor. (Contains 34 references.) (LB)

Investigates the effectiveness of a computer program that pronounces words for Scandinavian students with word decoding problems. Finds that second-grade children did not perform better on a reading comprehension test when using computer-aided reading and that older students benefited more than younger students. Discusses reasons for letting the…

Discusses how, in promoting more effective approaches to the reading and writing of information texts, practitioners in the Exeter Extending Literacy Project (EXEL) utilize scaffolding strategies to help students understand text features and incorporate these features into their written responses. (SR)

A variety of exercises based on manipulation of a single text are described. The activities involve replacing words or phrases in the text with synonyms or opposites, transposing gender, changing tenses, filling in blanks, and answering multiple-choice questions about linguistic forms. Three brief sample texts are offered. (MSE)

An approach to teaching and testing advanced French reading comprehension of expository social science texts is presented within a "communicative-cognitive" framework. Learners receive instructions that encourage them to perceive and use the writer's overall rhetorical scheme as a conceptual-functional framework for integrating the components.…

This article focuses on the value of developing the skills involved in grouping text into syntactically appropriate units with students having reading problems. It suggests use of phrase-cued texts (in which phrase boundaries are explicitly marked) to move from word-by-word reading to reading in meaningful phrases. (DB)

This study examined the effectiveness of repeated reading and assisted nonrepetitive strategies such as echo reading, cloze reading, and unison reading on reading and error rate, comprehension, and fluency with sixth-grade Chapter 1 students. Findings indicated equivalent benefits for both methods, with significant comprehension improvement over…

Data from 4 experiments in which 136 college students read a situation description and took the perspective of an uninformed addressee to determine whether a speaker was sarcastic suggest that readers use perspective-irrelevant information. The finding poses a problem for theories of language that assume the use of only relevant information. (SLD)

A study investigated children's understanding of the formal and functional aspects of written Chinese in an orthographic acceptability judgment task and a creative spelling task. Subjects were 60 Hong Kong children ages 4 to 9. Results suggest that learning to read and write in Chinese is not accomplished by rote learning of characters but through…

Studied effectiveness of a cooperative-learning approach designed to foster strategic reading and social studies learning, in three heterogeneous, culturally and linguistically diverse, fourth-grade classrooms. Found that the experimental-group students made greater gains than control-group students in reading comprehension, and equal gains in…

Discusses curriculum-based measurement as an alternative to both standardized and teacher-developed reading tests. Oral Reading Fluency, a curriculum-based measure of reading is presented as an accurate indicator of both general reading ability and reading comprehension, and as a means of monitoring reading progress towards functional literacy.…