Commonality analysis was used to look for school effects in gains in reading test scores for 877 fourth to sixth grade children in Elementary Secondary Education Act Title I remedial reading programs. The four groups of predictor variables that were investigated were background, mental ability, parental involvement, and school program. Commonality…

Representative research studies of the interference of Vernacular Black English (VBE) on beginning reading of VBE speakers at the phonological, grammatical, and lexical and content levels are examined. The following conclusions emerge: (1) phonological interference in learning to read has not been established; (2) VBE does not clearly interfere…

Noting that sensory impaired children often have poorly developed or ungeneralized concept development that impedes their ability to comprehend stories or content texts, this paper presents a brief description of the learning problems of these children as they relate to the reading process. It then presents implications for teaching reading and a…

This text for students of English as a second language is designed to develop reading skills and to expand general vocabulary as a preparatory step toward reading and understanding college texts. Particular attention is given to reading technique and to the development of reading speed. The articles, representative of current newspaper and…

Test questions were phrased according to different sentence structures in a study of the complexity level of items for 220 third-grade children. Both the sensitivity of wh-questions (who, what, where, etc.) as a dependent variable and differences between wh-questions eliciting subject and predicate nouns were investigated. Effects of paraphrase…

Four types of control groups are commonly used in cognitive manipulation studies: (1) no-treatment; (2) practice with own methods; (3) practice and training with competing treatments; and (4) practice and training with irrelevant treatments. There are problems associated with the use of each group as a baseline for identifying the "true"…

A resource kit is presented for the teaching of listening comprehension and colloquial usage in French at the advanced secondary level. The kit is represented by a teacher's guide, a student handbook entitled "Idees et personalites," and a set of transcripts of taped interviews. In the interviews, three young French Canadians discuss…

The New York State Preliminary Competency Test in Reading is designed to measure a student's ability to understand written material of varying levels of difficulty. Results are used to evaluate a student's current level of achievement in reading and to indicate the extent of compensatory or remedial help which may be necessary to pass the final…

This book describes the teaching of reading in Denmark. Topics discussed are the holistic educational approach to reading (essentially an eclectic reading method), reading instruction techniques used from kindergarten through high school, remedial instruction, individualization, and speed reading. An individualized speed reading method for adults…

The second of three skill sequence manuals for special education students considers the development of language arts. Objectives are listed sequentially for the following major areas (sample subcategories in parentheses): classification (listening/speaking, sorting, grouping); comprehension (affective, factual recall, following directions,…

Twenty-four English speakers from various regions of India were tested for the intelligibility of their speech. Recordings of speech in a variety of contexts were evaluated by listeners from the United Kingdom, the United States, Nigeria, and Germany. On the basis of the resulting intelligibility scores, factors which tend to hinder…

Structural reading difficulty of argumentative prose (text with an underlying message or superordinate principle), is related to the reader's approach to reading and learning. Ninety Swedish teenagers and adults with varying levels of formal education, were divided into three groups, based on their own descriptions of reading and learning: deep…

The effect of sentence complexity on the ability of 40 trainable mentally retarded mongoloids (median IQ 34.3) to comprehend and imitate verbally presented strings was examined in two studies. Comprehension ability was tested by asking each subject to indicate which of two pictures was being described in the sentence spoken by the examiner. Eight…

This collection of six articles on oral language is a product of the cooperative efforts of the National Conference on Research in English, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the International Reading Association, the Association for Childhood Education International, and the National Council of Teachers of English. It is…

Using 24 college and university teachers, this study investigated the effect of teaching styles on adult student learning and analyzed the results of a factor breakdown, interactions between teacher behavior and class and student characteristics, and profiles of teacher effectiveness. Gains in factual information were positively related to teacher…