Although reading has been studied extensively over the past few decades, its measurement and amelioration continues to be problematic. This paper explores the reasons for this within a psycho-educational perspective and offers several new alternative theoretical positions from which to view prose processing and enhancement. Implications for…

Reading and writing have traditionally been treated as separate processes, but some research on the relationship suggests that the two processes should be taught together. It is also proposed that skill in recognizing a text's main idea is a summarizing skill, demanding the cognitive and linguistic prerequisites appropriate to the text type. Good…

Aimed at entering college students whose skills are at a precollege level, this book focuses on reading comprehension and explores reading as a form of the thinking process. The primary focus of the book is on helping students grasp the main ideas and supporting details of material they are assigned to read in their college textbooks. Chapters…

Instructional Feature Analysis allows teachers to explain, articulate, and evaluate the processes by which students learn and the activities that involve students in those processes. To develop an Instructional Feature Analysis, teachers must first ask what processes their students need to engage in if they are to learn from a reading assignment.…

Thirty grade 4 subjects were individually tested on a digit span test of working memory capacity (Case and Kurland) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter). The Reading Span Test was administered using sentences at a grade 2, grade 4, and grade 6 reading level. It was predicted that, as the decoding demands of the stimulus sentences in…

Designed to assess how people read and comprehend information presented in picture-text amalgams in procedural texts, this instrument presents various combinations of text information and illustrative information on slides. Subjects are assigned to one of four conditions and directed to follow the instructions presented on the slides. Videotapes…

Readers as well as writers compose meaning. Using the same characteristics essential to effective writing--planning, drafting, aligning, revising, and monitoring--readers react creatively with the text. In response to the author's intention and their own knowledge base, they decide what they want to get from their reading. Constantly renegotiating…

In teaching Japanese as a second language, structure should be introduced through the spoken language so the forms are already familiar when the reading begins, just as the native Japanese child masters a syllabic writing system first then learns characters so that the graphic representation occurs within familiar grammatical patterns. (SCC)

A study examined the effect of gender, age, and cognitive task on three types of reading recall. Subjects, 40 boys and girls in the second grade and 40 in the fifth grade from a suburban Northeast school system, all reading at or above grade level, performed cued or free recall on four high-interest short stories. Reading recall was assessed via…

A 3-year project developed a procedure to achieve the objectives of using miscue analysis in the reading program in a way that is economical in time, applicable to more than one student at once, and usable as a teaching tool as well as a diagnostic tool. Three separate trials, in 1975, 1976, and 1977, refined and developed the procedure until it…

A study investigated the effects of the motivational variables of attribution and self-efficacy on the continued use of successfully learned strategies which promote independent learning from text. The subjects consisted of 11 freshmen and sophomore students participating in a two-week workshop on learning strategies which included a study project…

Studies from the interactive perspective regard reading and writing as processes which share a common knowledge base and have similar mental operations. First, according to this model, reading and writing are both interactive processes. Second, both readers and writers go through the same activities as planning, drafting, aligning, revising,…

A study explored the effects of both prior knowledge of acronyms and their form of presentation (cued or uncued) on reader recognition of acronym meaning. Among the hypotheses tested were that (1) a reader presented with an acronym ranked as familiar is more likely to recognize that acronym than one ranked unfamiliar, and (2) that a reader…

The comprehension of instructional text can be a cognitively demanding task because component comprehension processes compete for limited space within the readers' working memories. The component comprehension processes that readers must perform include recognizing words and retrieving their meanings, parsing sentences, identifying and organizing…

A study investigated the relationship between reading achievement and predictive abilities for narrative text structure of 96 fourth grade and 70 sixth grade readers. The subjects (1) silently read incomplete stories and then told the rest orally, and (2) silently read stories that had parts deleted and then orally gave information they thought…