A study was designed to examine the effectiveness of repeated reading in fluency and comprehension. A cross-age reading program was used to give students a purpose for rereading material. The children in a second-grade classroom in a private school in suburban New Jersey were randomly assigned to two sample groups. The experimental group read to a…

The role of item response theory (IRT) in determining the validity of second language tests is examined in the case of one specific test, the listening subtest of the Occupational English Test (OET), used in Australia to measure the language skills of non-native English-speaking health professionals. First, the listening subtest is described. Then…

A discussion of reading instruction in college English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) classes presents an overview of reading instruction theory, looks at the role of reading strategies and metacognitive awareness in reading, describes the SQ3R study skills method of instruction, and examines how the method can be used for developing independent…

Current theory posits that comprehension and meaning involve not only text but also what the reader brings to the text and the contextual elements of the reading. A study investigated how eight students in grade 9 read and created meaning from short story assignments in their English classrooms. Concurrent think-aloud protocols from four short…

The purpose of this research was to determine whether a computer assisted instruction (CAI) program increased the reading and math standardized test scores for selected sixth grade high risk students in a rural school district. Fifty-four randomly selected students' scores on the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT) Series were compared before and…

One of a series of semi-annual reports, this publication contains 25 articles which report the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instruments for its investigation, and practical applications. Articles are as follows: "Acoustic Shards, Perceptual Glue" (Robert E. Remez and Philip E. Rubin); "F0 Gives Voicing…

This study explored the enhancement of comprehension of expository text by three specific types of embedded explication--etymological, causal, and analogical--together with momentum effects from sequencing. Four factors were examined: (1) the experimental effects of presenting the section of the script containing explications of new terms before…

A study examined the effects of prediction training on the reading comprehension and written composition performance of fourth-grade students on the following reading and writing tasks: story recall, story generation, and number of relevant predictions. Subjects, 40 students attending two private urban elementary schools, were assigned to one of…

This bulletin was founded at the eleventh World Congress on Reading, held in London in 1986. Its subject is Literacy Education in Asia and its objective is to "enable different National Councils to share information about literacy in their own region and how problems are met." (WTB) (Adjunct ERIC Clearinghouse on Literacy Education)

In the course of a longitudinal study that addressed the questions of how children learn to comprehend what they read and how they learn science concepts, many other research questions emerged. The original longitudinal study investigated how children learn to comprehend what they read. Three school districts with fairly stable student…

A large segment of poor readers in elementary school do not supply prosodic features to print; in other words, they do not use pauses, changes in pitch, or differences in emphasis to show their comprehension. Two methods that help children to supply reading intonation involve using phrasally segmented texts and teacher modeling of the correct…

A series of three experiments was conducted for the purposes of (1) clarifying problems of previous research on the relationship between working memory capacity and performance on figural analogy tasks, and (2) exploring developmental issues concerning executive strategies, working memory capacity, and perceptual processing. Directly manipulating…

To investigate the higher level comprehension strategies used by children reading basal reader stories, a study compared the results of an earlier investigation of 50 fourth grade level readers' comprehension strategies with findings gained from 30 subjects using a sixth grade basal reader. Subjects were asked to read aloud from a basal and stop…

This research synthesis identifies a number of important concepts regarding the teaching of problem solving skills to students in grades K-12. Studies investigated what problem solving skills are and whether they can be taught, as well as how problem solving can be organized in the curriculum and how it should be taught. Major findings from the…

Research data in neurosurgery, neuropsychology, and neurolinguistics indicate that the human brain is lateralized toward one of two methods of information processing, and that, in most humans, the language bias appears to be a left hemisphere function, while the visiospatial bias belongs to the right. Furthermore, the left hemisphere seems to…