A classroom project designed to increase student comprehension of the rhythms of French journalistic language through familiarization with a weekly magazine is described. Examples of magazine articles dealing with foreign affairs, politics, and television program schedules with teacher-developed comprehension questions are included. (MSE)

Effective metacognitive instruction uses such procedures as "reciprocal high teaching" in which junior students take the teacher role and lead a dialog on text meaning. Components of successful metacognitive strategy instruction are: selecting useful and teachable strategies; informing learners of purpose; transfering control from teacher to…

Successful instructional strategies for enhancing the reading comprehension and comprehension test performance of learning disabled students are described. Students are taught to self-monitor their comprehension of expository materials and stories through recognition and analysis of recurrent elements and problem passages, content summarization,…

Rated speech phrasality scores of 40 deaf students (ages 4-17) were correlated to their reading comprehension scores according to four oral word groupings: whole sentences, phrases, nonmeaningful fragmented word groups, and single words. Among results was phrasal speaker superiority in comprehending phrased material in response to factual (not…

Discusses the following major theories in humanities and writing scholarship: (1) that relationships between humanities/arts and science/technology are cyclical, (2) that a discourse continuum is more useful in analyzing prose than a discourse taxonomy, and (3) that context creates meaning. (AEW)

Describes a study of the use of an integrated communication arts instructional strategy to facilitate comprehension in a high school history course indicating that subjects who wrote following brainstorming activities and text readings generated higher quality ideas and synthesized acquired information better than the groups that did not write.…

Explores the relative contributions of global vocabulary and specific attribute knowledge to the metaphorical comprehension of fluent and less fluent adult users of English. Results indicate that, for both groups, specific attribute knowledge was a better predictor of metaphorical interpretation than global vocabulary knowledge. (Author/CB)

Discusses aspects of reading research besides schemata theory and applies them to second language (L2) reading research. A technique is presented to introduce comprehension monitoring to students, and studies use reciprocal teaching and think-aloud procedures and appropriate L2 applications for each. (LMO)

The contribution of passage variables, question types, and format variables to reading comprehension was assessed for 50 successful and 50 unsuccessful readers. A three-stage conditional regression assessed the predictability of 20 predictor features on item difficulty scores. The location of response information and stem length accounted for…

Reviews 13 supplementary reading material series--including Impact on Reading, Project Achievement, and Be a Better Reader--useful for providing instruction and practice with a variety of comprehension skills. Includes evaluative comments for each series, noting series' emphases, levels, and publisher. Observes that materials can be used in…

Describes one teacher's approach to developing children's abilities as critical readers. Discusses classroom elements such as reading aloud to the class, student question writing, and small group discussions, which are influential in the process. (JK)

Describes a teaching model designed to develop reading comprehension and learning strategies through cooperative learning. Discusses benefits to students and offers suggestions for implementing the model. (FL)

Examines the effects of direct instruction in finding the main idea of an expository text, and in monitoring reading comprehension using self-generated questions based on main ideas. Reports that reading comprehension improved with direct instruction in main idea and question generating. (MM)

Evaluates Phil Ritchie's research report (same issue) on the effects of direct instruction in finding the main idea of expository texts and using self-generated questions to monitor text comprehension. Points out that the most successful teachers of comprehension are teaching comprehension skills directly. (MM)

A recent study of reading rates of first grade students in Israel and America indicates that increased reading speed may improve comprehension and oral reading. Based on this finding, activities to help students read faster (and better) are suggested. (JL)