Data generated in the 1974-75 and 1979-80 reading performance assessments conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were analyzed to determine if changes had occurred in the performance of Hispanic students. Results showed that although Hispanic students' reading performance remained below the national level, these…

Recent research in text structure and comprehension has several important implications for readability theory and practice. First, text-level factors such as coherence and organization must be considered along with word-level and sentence-level factors when evaluating the readability of a specific set of materials or when attempting to construct…

Defining lexical familiarizations as devices by means of which an author gives a reader an understanding of newly introduced key lexis, this paper discusses familiarizations in content area textbooks. The various sections of the paper examine the following topics: (1) the forms taken by lexical familiarizations, including use of reader experience,…

Two research studies were conducted to examine short term memory capacity and eye fixations as parts of the reading comprehension process. In the first study, varied aspects of the text and the readers' tasks were examined by monitoring the duration and sequence of readers' eye fixations. The results showed that readers made longer pauses at…

Drawing from an overview of cloze research, this paper sets forth the thesis that the validity of the cloze technique and its usefulness as a measuring device have been clearly established, but its usefulness as a teaching device has not been so determined. Salient points of research are summarized as follows: (1) if rates of developing…

A recent study found that "mentioning," or saying just enough about a topic to allow for an assignment related to it, had supplanted instruction in reading comprehension in grades three through six. As a replacement to "mentioning," a "preteaching" unit has been developed that concentrates on development of textbook…

A study was conducted to determine the role of story grammar in children's ability to detect misplaced information in simple narratives. The subjects, 27 second grade and 25 fifth grade students, each read six stories that had been developed for the study. The stories were one-episode narratives comprised of six grammatical categories with two…

An experiment was conducted in which the story schema, an idealized representation of the parts of a typical story and the relationship among those parts, was derived inductively by examining a large number of actual published stories to extract their common properties. In addition to developing a schema that simultaneously defines the essential…

A study investigated the effects of text condensation, field independence, and sex on students' comprehension of and attitudes toward instructional prose materials. Fifty-eight high school juniors and seniors were divided into three groups on the basis of sex and their scores on a field independence measure. Students in the original treatment were…

Arguing that the arts can contribute to the understanding of relationships basic to reading comprehension by providing opportunities for students to deal with abstractions and to form perceptual images related to those abstractions, this paper also contends that the arts can provide a means for transfer of basic concepts by taking seemingly…

More than 5,000 reading miscues by 96 eighth and ninth graders were analyzed in a study designed to define specific relationships among cue use and to extend research based on Kenneth Goodman's psycholinguistic theory to the secondary level. The students read two easy and two difficult passages orally and answered questions based on them. Each…

The standard dictionary definition of a metaphor--a word or phrase applied to an object or concept that it does not literally denote in order to suggest comparison with another object or concept--is inadequate in that it does not deal with whole sentence metaphors and that it provides no way of distinguishing between a metaphor and a semantic…

Only recently have attempts been made to systematically explore texts for the linguistic features that give continuity and coherence. Such research has potential meaning for the reading teacher if it can be shown that mastery of the linguistic mechanisms that create texts is a key to fluent reading. One cohesive tie is the process of anaphora…

Recognizing that behavioral objectives do not constitute a reading program but rather are instruments by which teachers may continually evaluate students' progress, determine their instructional needs, develop programs to meet those needs, and assess the results of those programs, this manual provides suggested behavioral objectives for four major…

The Kamehameha Early Education Program (KEEP) is a research and development program designed to develop, demonstrate, and disseminate methods for improving the education of Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian children; this report contains a description of the reading curriculum used in the KEEP demonstration school during the 1975-76 school year. The…