Standard English must be considered as a language that can and should be learned and used by any human who finds it advantageous to do so, but which has no more exotic and virtuous qualities than any other language or dialect. The teacher of standard English to speakers of Black English should be aware of the kinds of language skills that children…

A course that capitalizes on individual and group experiences and encourages students to expand their powers of observation and discernment is presented in the course, students analyzing their thoughts and translate them into written responses. The performance objectives are: A. Given opportunities to experience sensory and emotional stimuli,…

The existence of critical listening abilities as part of general listening ability was explored. The abilities were: (1) Detecting the Speaker's Purpose, (2) Analyzing and Judging Propaganda, and (3) Analyzing and Judging Arguments. Critical listening was defined as the process of examining spoken materials in the light of related objective…

In this study comprehension of sentences describing two events occurring simultaneously or in sequence was assessed in 5-, 7- and 9-year-old children. The sentences were at three different levels of linguistic complexity, differing only in whether simultaneity or sequentiality was described. Subjects were kindergarten, second, and fourth grade…

This paper discusses the relationship between cloze demands and reading comprehension and describes a cloze program used in a third-grade classroom. A series of exercises, including word attack, sentence completion, and vocabulary-development tasks, were given regularly by teachers to the students in their third-grade classrooms. Included in the…

This report describes the evaluation plan for the 1973-74 small-scale field test of the Comprehension element of the Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development and presents results for the eight field test objectives investigated. These objectives, the first three grouped under the rubric product usability and the next five grouped under…

Quantitative and qualitative aspects of the reading of narrative and expository materials were studied in a sample of 47 eighth-grade students. Informal Reading Inventories were developed from narrative and expository materials in use in the students' school, as were longer narrative and expository passages for miscue analysis. Passages were…

Interrelationships between productive oral proficiency in black dialect and in standard English and reading comprehension of passages differing in dialect and content were investigated in a sample of 98 sixth-grade black students. Results indicated that students were better readers as their oral patterns of speech were more representative of…

The effects of interest level on comprehension and word-recognition instructional levels were investigated in samples of fifth- and sixth-grade pupils. The effects of sex, ability, interest, and type of skill on performance on informal reading inventories were tested using a four-factor analysis of variance; each grade level was examined…

Word recognition, factual recall, and inferential comprehension skills of 30 fifth-year students who had been in an open education classroom for four years were compared with similar skills of fifth-year pupils who had been in a traditional classroom for four years. Pupils had been placed in an open or traditional classroom by parental choice, but…

This study was designed to investigate the effect of instruction in oral language (experience activities, synonym generation, and kernel sentence expansion) on certain aspects of first graders' oral language development and reading achievement. First graders in two elementary schools, randomly assigned to control and experimental groups, were…

This book suggests reading activities and teaching strategies to encourage students' success in the following middle school and secondary school content areas: business; driver education; English, speech, and journalism; art, music, and theater; foreign languages (French, Spanish, and German); health; home economics end industrial and vocational…

A programed reading curriculum involving map-graph skill acquisition was evaluated experimentally with 77 rural adolescents. Subjects, who were financially impoverished and three to four years behind national reading norms, were assigned randomly to the reading program alone or to the reading program supplemented by self-instructional exercises…

The author states that vocational education teachers in secondary schools have no more important task than to teach subject area reading skills to their students. He discusses common-sight reading skills (e.g., learning technical vocabulary), textbook/manual skills (e.g., using a textbook), and shop/lab/classroom skills (e.g., identifying tools).…

Four readability indices that focus on the ease of comprehension of printed material are applied to industrial education textbooks for senior high school students. Grade reading levels by subject areas for the four indices are presented in tables, charts, and text. Certain conclusions about the readability techniques studied are suggested. (MF)