Researchers investigating study strategies have observed that the textbooks themselves often contribute to students' comprehension and learning difficulties. Teachers, by being aware of qualities of inconsiderate texts, can identify poorly written texts, can prepare students for difficulties in upcoming sections of the text, and can instruct…

The developmental approach to high school literature study in this guide involves an instructional model emphasizing fluency (a period of responsiveness and support by the teacher), control (that part of instruction traditionally recognized as a high school literature), and precision (that phase of instruction in which rigor and intensity in…

Oral production (the speech act) and the comprehension of written and oral texts have long been treated as separate entities when they could be used in an integrated approach to teach a broader range of language skills. The receptive aspects of the speech act should be brought into language instruction and used to select materials for teaching…

A study examined the effects of "round robin reading" (RRR) as an instructional procedure in social studies. Specifically, the study asked whether an oral textbook presentation had a significant effect on learning social studies material and if grade level, reading level, social studies knowledge, and gender significantly affected the…

Defining reading as a dynamic, interactive process involving the reader in constructing meaning, this guide for the elementary and secondary curriculum was designed to facilitate effective and creative decision making by teachers for (1) integrating reading and writing across the curriculum, (2) developing readers who can independently apply…

Noting the growing interest in recent years in the use of mentalistic measures in studying the reading process, this paper draws upon findings of studies conducted at the Hebrew University in Israel to show how mentalistic measures have been used effectively in reading research. Following a discussion of the unique role mentalistic data can play…

A study of predictors of reading comprehension in English as a second language had as subjects 33 adult students in full-time intensive English classes at the intermediate and advanced levels of reading. Each was tested with an oral and a written language inventory, and each response was recorded as syntagmatic or paradigmatic. Other tests…

As part of the Teacher Explanation Project (TEP), a study examined the relationships among third-grade teachers' concepts of reading, the concepts of reading they communicated during instruction to low-level readers, and the students' concepts of reading. Subjects, 20 third-grade teachers, participated in the yearlong TEP study conducted in an…

An analysis of schema theory at the compositional and sentence levels and its implications for Japanese readers of English prose is presented. The study looks at differences between Japanese and English syntax and concludes with five recommendations for English reading instruction for this group. The recommendations include: (1) pursuing the…

A study attempted to estimate the instructional sensitivity of items in three reading comprehension tests in English as a second language (ESL). Instructional sensitivity is a test-item construct defined as the tendency for a test item to vary in difficulty as a function of instruction. Similar tasks were given to readers at different proficiency…

Articles in this eighth yearbook of the American Reading Forum address the dilemmas of teaching reading. Articles, listed with their authors, are as follows: (1) "Deepening a Dilemma: Stylus vs. Computer Writing at an Early Primary Level" (J. Heep); (2) "Concept Maps and Vee Diagrams: Strategies To Deal with the Dilemma of the Restricted…

Observation has suggested that different subgroups of precocious readers might be distinguished by different patterns of strengths and weaknesses. In particular, it seems that one group of children might be distinguished by the strength of their top-down, conceptually driven processes and another by their strong bottom-up, text driven processes.…

Recent research suggests that an understanding of a simple children's story can demand sophisticated knowledge of concepts, social life, and literary forms. A well-written story for beginning readers will relate goal-directed event sequences in a coherent and relatively complete form, but understanding the story involves processes extending beyond…

A study investigated the effects of nonverbal and verbal classification abilities on reading comprehension. Subjects, 104 fourth grade students, were tested on three measures of classification skill (a shifting of criteria task, a free sorting task, and a three-level hierarchical classification task) and on a measure of recall of relevant story…

Teaching reading comprehension as a process rather than a product demands new instructional techniques. As the psycholinguistic model of reading suggests, readers use prior knowledge and linguistic competence to confirm, reject, or revise predictions on the text's meaning. Methods increasing readers' consciousness of their role in the…