Reports poor scores for college students asked to define the meanings of ten foreign words placed in and out of context. Urges news writers to use words familiar to the audience, or else to provide parenthetical or other explanations of unfamiliar or foreign words. (RL)

In both cued and noncued conditions, young adult and middle aged females were presented with immediate and delayed free recall tasks using historical prose passages. Results indicated there were no significant age differences and that having lived through an era helped slightly recall of that era's events. (Author/RD)

Undergraduates read a prose passage and were tested on its contents. Difficulty, permission to underline key phrases, and financial motivation were varied. Non-highly motivated subjects performed better on the easy version; underlining aided highly motivated subjects and those reading the difficult version. (Author/RD)

Shows how a content area teacher can help students relate prior experiences to the new information to be gained through the reading assignment. (MKM)

Daily measures of reading comprehension were obtained for three learning disabled fourth and fifth grade boys in two settings--their regular classrooms and a special remedial setting. (Author)

Basal readers are supposed to be easy for children to read, but sometimes their language is so unnatural that it's more confusing than helpful. (MKM)

Cites examples that show that schools do make a positive difference and that reading scores have not declined. (MKM)

Two experiments are described in which reaction times for understanding target sentences or phrases in terms of a preceding context were measured. It is argued that both experiments can be accounted for in terms of contextually generated expectations. (Author/RM)

Providing specific instructions on reading material to be retained or to be forgotten induced college students to study all the material at a slower pace. A second experiment indicated that increased reading time was necessary for retention of the emphasized sentences. (Author/GDC)

University students in India generally dislike reading English classics, but some students well prepared in advance enjoyed Dickens'"Tale of Two Cities." They first read an illustrated comic book version, then read a dramatized version while listening to a recording, and then read an abridged version before reading the original. (CFM)

Study goals may be less effective when the sequence of the list of goals does not match the sequence of goal-relevant information in a reading passage. In a study using undergraduates, learning of goal-relevant information was lower when the study goals and text sequences did not match. (Author/GDC)

Two experiments examined characteristics of text that determine when a repeated noun has a clearly identified referent. Verbs and article modifiers appeared to influence whether a noun is merely a repeated word in a text, or whether it is redundant at the propositional level. (SW)

Examines six science books in reference to their reading levels as determined by the Fry, SMOG, and Fog formulas. A disparity in calculated values is noted and explained to be the result of the use of different comprehension levels by the formulas. Suggestions concerning the selection of science reading materials for the classroom are provided.…

The reading comprehension items for a revision of the Nelson Reading Skills Test were administered to several hundred fourth and sixth-grade pupils in order to determine the passage dependency of each item. The passage dependency index was used to locate weak items. (Author/JKS)

Presents and explains a diagram of a model of the reception of literature by the reader. Some of the factors that lead to "suboptimal comprehension" are mentioned. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)