Discusses some problems in the rating of achievement in auditory understanding, as well as types of exercises for the teaching of English in general and for specific professions. (IFS/WGA)

Reviews research relevant to understanding the conditions in which elaborative inferences are made, with a particular concern for the implications for schema-theoretic notions of comprehension. (FL)

Reports a study indicating that summarization training of sixth-grade students improved recall of major but not minor information on a studying task and that such training is an effective tool for improving reading and studying skills. Includes ways to improve summarization instruction for children of this age group. (HTH)

Three studies examined three-, five-, and seven-year-old children's understandng of verbal terms ("easy" and "hard") concerning personal competence. Studies focused on developmental change in understanding the terms and were designed to provide information about the order in which understanding of the terms was acquired. (HOD)

Presents arguments for and against: the theoretical acceptance of language skills breakdown; the Unitary Competence Hypothesis/General Language Proficiency theory; and the existence of a separate listening comprehension factor in language ability. Also considered is the technique of factor analysis in language research. (CB)

Examines how students make and revise meaning when writing in purposeful, informal ways about their interpretation of literary texts. Also reveals five ways in which students develop their understanding of literature through writing. Suggests a mutually enriching reading-writing process of interpretation. (AEW)

Focuses on the underlying elements in the reading comprehension process that better distinguish its developmental phases. Offers suggestions for the acquisition of strategies pertaining to textual organization that, together with proposed activities for comprehension, contribute to the formation and consolidation of reading habits. Includes…

Reviews the literature relevant to the subject of comprehension monitoring and offers ideas from the reading research for how students can improve their comprehension and how teachers can tell if students understand what they read. (JC)

Describes a basic reading course designed to meet the specific needs of the weakest basic writers enrolled in a large midwestern university with an open admissions policy. Shows how the developmental course improved the students' reading comprehension so they could better understand the texts they would encounter in college courses. (SKC)

Provides information on how to use newspaper comic strips with reluctant, older disabled readers because the visual nature of the comics helps reading comprehension. Activity types include: (1) categorizing; (2) finding main ideas; (3) comparing; (4) determining cause-effect relationships; and (5) predicting outcomes. (SKC)

Among techniques which can be used by foreign language teachers to help learners use multiple-choice tests (after reading a text) to become better readers are: have students attempt to answer questions before reading the text; rearrange the order of the questions; and have students make up multiple choice questions. (CB)

Examples are presented of worksheets designed to help students prepare for discussions of literature in terms of the language, plot, and literary aspects of a particular work. All examples are from an introductory course in German literature. Benefits of using such worksheets include increased students comprehension and class participation. (LMO)

Investigates the relationship between employee productivity with new technology and listening ability. Data entry employees from two divisions of a large corporation were given a standardized test to assess their listening ability. Results reveal that employees who received listening training performed at significantly higher levels than those who…

Reports two studies of comprehensible and memorable expository writing. Finds that Time-Life editors' revisions of a high school history text improved eleventh grade students' recall, while revisions made by text linguists and composition instructors did not. But given latitude to change content, all editors' revisions improved recall. (RAE)

Poor readers often know only the most common meanings or nuances of multimeaning (polysemic) words frequently encountered in reading materials. Teacher-directed, systematic vocabulary instruction must focus on specific problem areas. A three-step plan for teaching multimeaning words is proposed, emphasizing recognition and classification of word…