A corollary of the principle that reading comprehension depends on language comprehension is that word skill plus language comprehension skill produces reading comprehension skill. This corollary points to word decoding as being the major source of differences in skilled reading. Various data supporting this claim have been collected from…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of reader generated questions while studying textbook-type material. One hundred and eight college students were assigned to one of the following treatment conditions: experimenter presented questions before reading, reader generated questions before reading, experimenter presented questions…

Theories of reading development may be grouped into roughly two opposing categories, depending on where the source of reading control is assumed to be located. "Outside-in" theories, those characterized by the notion that reading is a hierarchical series of decisions dependent on structured discrimination of print material, clearly predominate.…

The development of a readability formula designed to determine the readability level of German instructional materials at the elementary level is discussed in this paper. The readability formula which was developed is called the German Readability Graph and is similar to the Fry Readability Graph. Syllables and number of sentences are counted per…

In this study, the effect of a passage organizer (topic sentence) on the ability to identify main ideas was tested. The second purpose of this study was to determine whether main idea comprehension is affected by the type of main idea question asked. Thirty third- and thirty fourth-grade children selected on a random basis from a semi-rural…

To identify the characteristics of professional publications preferred by teachers, 200 primary-grade teachers selected at random from the membership of the International Reading Association (IRA) completed a questionnaire about their concerns in reading, the sources consulted for assistance, and the features preferred. A subsample of 25 completed…

The purpose of this research was to explore the level of perceptual processing being used by normal and educable mentally retarded beginning readers. The investigation tested the hypothesis that beginning readers show a positive relationship between word length and word recognition latency, implying serial processing. Data on accuracy and latency…

The Modified Packard method of discourse analysis, based on eight functional aspects of discourse relationships--elaboration, reason, comparison/contrast, temporal, emphasis, coordination, subordination, and superordination--was applied to the open-ended recalls of randomly selected honors students trained in the Evelyn Wood method and to a…

Cognitive confusion is the common state of young persons in regard to concepts of units of writing. In the past 10 years, research has accumulated to show that all children pass through the important stage of initial cognitive confusion in learning to read. Children often confuse "writing" with "drawing,""letter" with "number," and so on.…

As a response to the close of the 1972 International Book Year sponsored by UNESCO, this study was suggested concerning the reading habits of people throughout the world. A concern was expressed that without reading practice reading skills already learned would be quickly lost and life-long education would not take place. The author surveyed…

Various aspects of 145 representative oral and written compositions of six- and seven-year-old new literates are discussed in this paper. The determination to label these compositions as "primitive fiction" was made primarily on the assumption that children's first attempts at fictive narrative take on the aspects of their cultural literary…

This study was concerned with the validation of the "Hicks Cloze-Reading Test," an evaluative instrument to be used by the classroom teacher in assessing the reading ability levels of children. Three instruments, the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test," the "Standard Reading Inventory," and the "Hicks Cloze-Reading…

This study investigated the relationship between rate of information processing and critical reading and the anciallary effect of anxiety on the two variables. A tenth grade sample, consisting of 52 fast readers and 52 slow readers, was identified. All subjects in the sample had intelligence quotients of 120 or higher and vocabulary and…

The purposes of this study were to determine the effect of word length on the learning difficulty of words found in reading materials for early primary level children, to determine learning difficulty indices of a set of fifty words, to compare the effectiveness of three methods of vocabulary instruction, and to replicate treatments for thirteen…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of real and nonsense pictures with no labels, high-frequency labels, or low-frequency labels in discrimination learning of young children. The subjects were 102 second-grade children randomly selected from several classrooms located in a semi-rural community in Wisconsin. The subjects were…