Children aged 7 to 9 were tested for their recall after hearing, orally reading, and silently reading comparable stories. Boys exhibited very poor recall performance after silent reading compared with their recall after listening and after oral reading. Girls showed comparable recall performance across all three language reception modes.…

At intervals during the reading of an article, college students were asked to stop and state how they were preparing to answer an unspecified question about the article. Those students who had attempted to discern the question had significantly superior performance to those who had not devised such a strategy. (JN)

Reviews the literature pertaining to the relationship between textbook illustrations and reading comprehension in elementary school students and finds that the effects of the relationship have not been clearly established. Poses questions for future research. (FL)

Implies that instruction can help students improve in reader-based processing of text and that strategies for making schema-general questions story-specific are necessary for processing, storing, and retrieving information from complex short stories. (AEA)

Concludes that the misspellings of poor college-age readers have more internal errors and more dysphonetic misspellings than those of good readers. Offers suggestions for instruction based on these findings. (FL)

A study was done to investigate the use of graphic organizers to compensate for text that was poorly organized. Results support assimilation encoding theory and suggest that organizers aid recall when readers must reorganize information but are of little value when reorganization is unnecessary. (Author/JN)

Poor comprehenders from grades five and six were asked to read and rate the comprehensibility of three short passages. Passages with large numbers of modifying words were considered the least comprehensible. Support exists for the hypothesis that poor comprehenders process print in piecemeal fashion. (Author/JN)

College students wrote summaries of short passages to assess their ability to identify important information. Naive summaries judged as "better" contained more major semantic roles, such as agent, than did summaries judged "not as good". Students wrote better summaries when instructed to use major semantic roles within the passage. (Author/RD)

The role of feedback, opportunity for text review, and confidence in subjects' responses was examined using a 25-frame program on heart disease. Undergraduates participated in a pre- post-test design; all subjects received an immediate post-test. Results replicated and extended a model relating feedback, confidence, and post-test response.…

Sex-oriented reading materials were found to have a differential effect on the recall scores of boys and girls ages 9-10. A similar, nonsignificant trend was found for the comprehension scores based on the cloze procedure. The sex of the tester had no significant effect on performance. (Author/SJL)

An outline of seven important steps for teaching vocabulary development includes components of language development, visual memory, visual-auditory perception, speeded recall, spelling, reading the word in a sentence, and word comprehension in written context. (JN)

By understanding factors that can make reading difficult for students who are normally able readers, content teachers can facilitate comprehension in their classes. (AEA)

Briefly discusses theories on second language reading strategies and describes pilot study conducted at University of Ottawa using cloze procedure to help determine roles of syntactic versus semantic cues and similarities and/or differences between L1 and L2 reading strategies. (Author/BK)

Raises problem of affective acceptance by teachers and student teachers of psycholinguistic formulations appearing to run counter to intuitive notions of the reading process. Presents three psycholinguistic formulations operationalized via several modified reading experiences. Demonstrates use by the reader of multiple information sources and…

To cope with a wide range of reading skill levels in their classes, high school social studies teachers must assess their students' competence and then help them develop skills to understand course materials. This article describes two assessment methods and five skill teaching methods. For journal availability, see SO 509 175. (AM)