To investigate the effects of perceptual training upon selected measures of reading achievement in grade 1, 12 experimental classrooms of randomly selected first graders received a 29-day adaptation of the Frostig Program for the Development of Visual Perception. Thirteen control classes added comparable time to the regular reading instructional…

Several case histories of hyperlexic children whose abilities in word recognition are at a level significantly higher than their general level of intellectual functioning are described, and the impact of such a condition on the child is suggested as an object of research. In the sever"l cases presented, the hyperlexia re"ulted in environmental…

This paper investigates the ways readers use two semantic tools, synonymy and entailment, when responding to reading-comprehension questions. After a brief overview of semantic theory, two reading passages and their attendant multiple-choice questions are analyzed, demonstrating how readers might choose the correct answer by analyzing the way it…

This paper reviews approaches to understanding how adolescents of different ages and abilities read and understand literature. The specific examples discussed focus on the contrast between "describer" and "explainer" responses to passages in which literary characters experience sudden and traumatic changes in their lives.…

Samples of forty students at ages twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen participated in a study of adolescents' sensitivity to suddenly changed circumstances of literary characters. Each student answered six questions on each of five passages; for each set, two questions focus on the story itself and four require consideration of consequences of…

A study was designed to examine the relationship between certain measures of cognitive development and reading scores, particularly reading comprehension scores. Forty-one adult basic education students, ranging from 16 to 62 years of age (mean age of 25) and predominantly from lower socioeconomic groups, were administered the following three…

This volume is intended for secondary content area classroom teachers. The booklet is made up of selected portions of articles from periodical literature dealing with secondary reading. These articles meet the practical requirements of content area teachers who want to teach reading but who are unsure of where to begin and what to do. The five…

This paper constructs a taxonomy for non-oral reading based on Kenneth and Yetta Goodman's reading research. Cloze type deletions reveal how proficient readers and low ability readers from 6 to 14 years of age use graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic cues. It compares performance of Australian children on oral reading and outline strategies with…

A sample of 180 students in fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grades participated in a study of the effect of age on the precision of interpretation of metaphorical language. All students read at or above fourth grade level. Metaphorical-language interpretation ability was measured by a 38-item instrument developed by the investigator using…

By comparing the strategies involved in creating a poem and in writing a government report, this paper presents a model of reading and writing processes for exploring the relationship between literature and technical writing and for pointing out the similarities in the use of texts. The model assumes that the student approaches a piece of writing…

The main purpose of these two studies was to determine whether or not generating good comprehension questions while studying prose material was an effective study technique. In the first study there were two treatment groups to which the high school seniors participating in the study were randomly assigned: a questioning-with-training or a…

Thirty-four fourth-grade students participated in a study of the way in which children acquire frameworks used to recall and encode stories. The study tested the hypotheses that children have a consistent preference for a story structure node in which they identify narrative events as comprising plausible story themes, that the framework generated…

To test the effects of prequestions and postquestions on word recognition and comprehension, two studies were conducted involving two groups of first through fifth grade students. An informal reading inventory using passages from Harper and Row's "Basic Reading Program" was administered and the results on the lowest instructional and frustrational…

Studies were conducted to investigate cue system utilization by three groups of readers--six second graders, six ninth graders, and four adults past the age of sixty who were rated as mature readers. The second graders read materials that varied according to organizational structure, while the other groups read materials that differed in the…

Ninety-six educable mentally retarded individuals (10-16 years old) were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions to listen to a 20-sentence story. Picture Ss viewed illustrations of the story, Imagery Ss were instructed to generate mental pictures of the story, Repitition Control Ss heard each sentence of the story twice, and…