Children's well-developed oral language skills obviously facilitate their reading and learning to read. In contrast to a traditional position which contends that reading comprehension equals oral comprehension skills plus decoding, this paper claims that a child must learn (and, perhaps, unlearn) many more skills in the transition from oral…

Translating legal and bureaucratic language into plain, comprehensible English is not amenable to simple rules and procedures. Rewriting comprehensibly requires specialized knowledge about language and an awareness of a number of misconceptions and pitfalls. This paper discusses what not to do in rewriting, based upon rewritten documents presently…

The purpose of this teaching unit is to improve the reading skills of fifth grade students, particularly reading comprehension, by increasing their knowledge about how language works. The three sections of the unit introduce the students to the concepts of context clues and paraphrasing (words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories) and give the…

The construct validity of measures of reading comprehension was discussed. A word deletion procedure was proposed consistent with a model of comprehension which emphasizes the importance of context. The procedure assures sensitivity to context by allowing only highly constrained words to be deleted and by increasing the information value of…

The effectiveness of an eight week college course for reading/study skills improvement was evaluated by pretesting and posttesting 152 students with the Nelson-Denny Reading Test and the Optimum Reading Achievement Test and running simple correlations between reading rate, comprehension, vocabulary, and 18 variables that included ACT scores, grade…

Discusses using key words as carriers of meaning for sentences, offering sample sentences in the fields of (1) dictation and guided narration, (2) structural pattern drills, (3) spoken dialog, and (4) silent reading. Here key words are important in deducing the meaning of new words. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

A study was designed to determine whether scores for general knowledge, specific knowledge, and general interest on a topic could be used as predictors of children's listening comprehension. Baseball and dolls were chosen as the topics because their stereotypic nature would allow the data to be generalized across the subject population. Data were…

The Enrichment Triad Model proposed by Joseph Renzulli offers guidelines for planning instruction for gifted students that can foster wide reading for specific purposes. The model is based on three different types of enrichment. The first type includes general exploratory activities designed to expose learners to areas in which they may be…

This paper explores the influence of field independent-dependent cognitive style on second language test performance, especially as it relates to performance on the integrative type of measure known as the cloze test. Approximately 250 college students enrolled in a first semester Spanish course formed the sample group for this correlational…

A study examined the use of context clues in identifying unknown words embedded in three types of text (fiction, exposition, and science). Subjects were 24 eighth grade students who read three passages at the fifth grade level, each with four content words deleted from them and replaced with pseudowords. Context clues for these pseudowords were…

The 10 articles in this book examine how comprehension is affected by what the reader brings to the text, the manner in which the text is structured by the author, and the contextual variables that shape the meaning derived by the reader. Specific topics covered in the articles are (1) background knowledge and comprehension, (2) learning how to…

This paper describes Directed Activities Related to Text (DART), procedures that were developed and are used in the Reading for Learning Project at the University of Nottingham (England) to enhance learning from texts and that fall into two broad categories: (1) text analysis procedures, which require students to engage in some form of analysis of…

A study was conducted to discover what adult literacy students in Northern Ireland felt about a series of booklets that had been developed especially for such students and to find out the students' levels of comprehension of the materials--specifically to determine if comprehension depended on the subject's reading age. Twenty-one male students…

This study examined the effects of three modes of story reconstruction training on the development of children's story comprehension. One hundred and eight children in grades K to 2 were randomly assigned to one of three training conditions: thematic-fantasy play, adult lead discussion, or drawing. The children were read three books on separate…

A comparative analysis of the oral reading miscues of 20 average and above-average readers entering sixth grade was made in relation to syntax, semantics, and patterns of comprehension and grammatical relationships. Miscues generated while reading passages in science, social studies, mathematics, and literature were analyzed, and the relationship…