Research on six major issues in reading is organized into charts and a bibliography. For each of the six areas (schema theory, reading strategies and processes, comprehension studies, culture and reading, methods for teaching reading, cognitive/metacognitive issues), relevant research is summarized in a chart. Each chart contains two sections, one…

A study examined three issues concerning reading comprehension: amount of instruction in comprehension strategies; cultural backgrounds of students; and transfer and self-initiated automaticity. Two methods of creating transfer--students either taught a strategy they had learned to younger classmates, or created their own strategic lessons and…

A study determined the relationship between life stress and reading comprehension test scores on the IOWA Tests of Basic Skills. Subjects, 41 middle-school students attending Lincoln School in Garwood, New Jersey, were surveyed as to the amount of life stress prevalent in their lives. In addition, the Iowa scores for reading comprehension were…

This paper examines how language is simplified for pedagogical purposes and reports on a study of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners' reactions to reading variously simplified and unsimplified texts. A total of 36 ESL learners of intermediate proficiency at the university-entrance level read, recalled, and commented on original texts and…

It is argued that limited-English-proficient (LEP) readers, like all readers, process print with the intent to comprehend it, and all readers bring different background knowledge that influences how they derive meaning from text. Cultural influences are extremely significant in determining background knowledge, both cognitive and social. The…

A year long lesson plan is is presented that describes an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL)/English for Specific Purposes (ESP) reading course designed for students in Spain. The reading skills focused on in the plan are clearly those necessary for research or comprehension of technical texts. The theoretical basis of the approach is described,…

Reading and writing have traditionally been treated as separate processes, but some research on the relationship suggests that the two processes should be taught together. It is also proposed that skill in recognizing a text's main idea is a summarizing skill, demanding the cognitive and linguistic prerequisites appropriate to the text type. Good…

Aimed at entering college students whose skills are at a precollege level, this book focuses on reading comprehension and explores reading as a form of the thinking process. The primary focus of the book is on helping students grasp the main ideas and supporting details of material they are assigned to read in their college textbooks. Chapters…

Items in the verbal (Hebrew and English) sections of the Psychometric Entrance Test (PET) administered for university admission in Israel were studied for differential item functioning (DIF) between the sexes. Analyses were conducted for 4,354 males and 4,901 females taking Form 3 of the PET in April 1984, and 3,786 males and 3,815 females taking…

The annotated bibliography, developed as a part of a course in methodology for teaching English as a Second Language (ESL), focuses on classroom techniques for developing reading comprehension. References appear under the following five headings: (1) background information on theory; (2) interaction; (3) current research findings; (4) vocabulary…

Originally developed for the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS) system, this learning package on reading in the content areas is designed for teachers who wish to upgrade or expand their teaching skills on their own. The package includes a comprehensive search of the ERIC database; a lecture giving an overview on the topic; the full text of…

Thirty grade 4 subjects were individually tested on a digit span test of working memory capacity (Case and Kurland) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter). The Reading Span Test was administered using sentences at a grade 2, grade 4, and grade 6 reading level. It was predicted that, as the decoding demands of the stimulus sentences in…

The passage comprehensibility of three diagnostic reading tests--the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test, the Spache Diagnostic Reading Scales, and the Durrell Analysis of Reading Difficulty--was evaluated using the following text variables: content familiarity, vocabulary, the number of idea units in the text, the number of text-based inferences…

Two studies examined the relationship between word knowledge and reading comprehension. Subjects were college undergraduates with high and low verbal abilities as indicated by a standardized verbal aptitude test. The first study involved a multiple choice vocabulary test from which words that both groups defined correctly were selected. The…

A developmental study investigated the pictorial and linguistic main idea identification skills of 104 students in second, fifth, and eighth grades. In the pictorial task, the subjects studied a complete picture story and ranked the effectiveness of four separate main idea alternatives at capturing the meaning of the story. Following the same…