The ability of English as a second language (ESL) readers to comprehend different types of nominal compounds in English technical literature was investigated. College students were asked to recover the meaning of 73 nominal compounds in two technical English language articles on occupational health and safety. The intermediate and advanced ESL…

Planned, individualized vocabulary instruction is an essential ingredient of developmental reading classes, and deserves special attention, since expanding word knowledge is the one area related to reading comprehension in which student progress can be directly observed and measured by the learner in daily or weekly increments. The two factors…

This study investigated how students processed information obtained by reading a passage related to inertial reference frames. Two groups of 10th-grade students (one group consisting of students identified as potential National Merit Scholars and another consisting of students enrolled in level-I biology) read a science text passage and answered a…

One of six related documents, this publication contains a U.S. Air Force course designed to help students improve their reading skills. The chapters contain lessons on reading habits and how they affect the reader, exercises to identify one's reading speed, an improvement program, exercises to improve eye movement and to reduce eye fixations,…

Based on a comparison between two types of questions reflecting a distinction among various levels of learning--verbatim or rote and high order or meaningful--it is hypothesized that meaningful learning postquestions would facilitate retention more than rote-learning postquestions. (RC)

To enhance reading comprehension and critical reading skills, more attention should be placed on patterns inherent in the English language. (JH)

Offers specific examples of instructional goals and their corresponding teaching techniques used in "The Electric Company" that do not substantiate the definition of reading as communication between author and reader, the effective reader being one who brings meaning to the printed word. (TO)

Approximately 1200 students in first, second, and sixth grade participated in prepublication trials of selected materials from the Harper & Row "Reading Basics Plus" reading program. Students were tested before and after the two-week instructional period on the skills taught by the experimental materials. Information on such other facets of the…

A previous report defined a series of 14 novel measures for determining the comprehensibility of English text on the basis of current psycholinguistic and Structure-of-Intellect concepts. That report not only suggested the potential usefulness of the measures but also conjectured about the feasibility of automating the calculation of these…

After a discussion of the confused terminology, overlapping categories, and ambiguity evident in categorization of comprehension questions in current reading series and in the literature on comprehension, a comprehensive classification scheme is proposed that seeks to avoid these problems. The proposed classification scheme has three orthogonal…

A primary-grade-level instrument was developed to measure thinking prerequisites to reading comprehension. Levels of responses are identified as either perceptual or conceptual; the ability to synthesize concepts from several sources and make generalizations is also measured. Analyses of partial construct validity, of cross-form reliability, and…

To investigate the dramatic reduction in the discriminating power of reading tests with children above the ages of 10-11 years, a test was devised based on the GAP test, itself based on the cloze technique shown to be effective in assessing reader comprehension. The GAP tests requires the reader to supply words deleted from a passage of continuous…

This study involved the use of interspersed questions as an instructional procedure to aid improvement in reading efficiency. Subjects, 86 college students enrolled in an undergraduate course in methods for teaching secondary reading, practiced (five times) reading nonfiction narrative selections, trying to increase their reading speed. The…

This paper is a discursive presentation of results of an examination of comprehension instruction provided by widely used basal reader series. Focusing on selections in the first three grades of the 1976 Houghton Mifflin Reading Series, the analyses looked at the sorts of selections the students are asked to read, at the amount of text which they…