A study investigated whether fluency in oral reading, as indicated by proper intonation, could be used as a measure of college students' reading comprehension. The study was designed to look at the three features of intonation--pitch, stress, and juncture--separately and in combination to determine whether any one or a combination of all the…

A theory of textual processing signals--cues to guide the response of any reader to a narrative text--can be evolved from Gerald Prince's theory of reading interludes and William Labov's work on narrative evaluation. An examination of these signals in two personal experience narratives written by students in remedial and freshman writing courses…

A study investigated (1) the effectiveness of giving instructions to form mental images prior to reading a text and at the conclusion of the text, and (2) sex differences in the ability of below average readers to form mental images. Subjects were 47 sixth grade students who were below average readers. The subjects were randomly assigned, by sex,…

Designed to improve students' discussion skills and to promote independent reading, the "Talking about Books" program stresses the improvement of oral language through peer group discussion of books. Like the Junior Great Books program, "Talking about Books" requires that students read selected books independently and then participate in group…

This is an account of some of the issues raised during 5 years of design, development and operation of the English Language Testing Service (ELTS). The measures in question are made up of five sub-tests: two general tests of reading and listening comprehension, and three modular tests of language study skills in reading, writing, and speaking. The…

Four inquiries were conducted to provide some initial feedback on the operation of the Directed Activities Related to Text Project. Three were concerned with aspects of process and examined such problems as the ways in which the actual course of a text-based lesson reflects the objectives of the project, and how such a lesson can be shown to…

The Santa Fe Community College (Gainesville, Florida) offers courses to prepare students for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). The two classes--one intermediate and one advanced--meet three times a week for three hours each session. Grammar explanations are presented during the first two classes each week, and students are offered…

Item banks offer a different approach to test development than that of the more traditional item specification method. This study was designed as an initial comparative investigation in the Area. Fourth grade math and reading tests were developed using both items written from item specifications and items drawn from an existing item bank. Four…

Working under the hypothesis that a child's concept of a story and his or her concept of the task of narration used to tap comprehension emerge first in social interaction, a methodology was created for studying the process of development from dependent functioning in social interaction to independent functioning based on L. Vygotsky's theoretical…

A study was conducted to gain insight into the question answering abilities of good and poor readers by comparing how well they answered questions when their prior knowledge was at two different levels (high, low) and in four different states. These states of prior knowledge consisted of the ways in which answers to the questions were stored in…

A study was conducted to determine the stability of the effect of sex-typed reading material on the reading interests and comprehension of fifth grade boys and girls. It involved a direct replication of a 1967 study so that a comparison of data from the 312 subjects of that study could be made with the data from 374 subjects of 1979. Reading…

The increased interest in reading comprehension by researchers in fields other than reading education is noted in this paper. In addition, the concerns of the new researchers in reading are described, some of the terms they are using are explained, and the implications of their findings for reading instruction are explored. The interests of…

A study was conducted to compare five different techniques for determining the best means of assessing a reader's background knowledge and for discovering if it is possible to elicit different amounts of information from the same subject by simply varying techniques. Subjects were 32 third through sixth grade students, divided into groups of…

The preparation and use of an objective strength analysis report (OSAR) from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) are described. The OSAR was designed to answer two needs: (1) a format which allows the school to easily answer the question "which reading objectives need more emphasis and/or better materials or techniques in order to raise its…

The 34 summaries contained in this collection represent the theoretical positions and the empirical studies of a wide variety of investigators currently working in the field of language comprehension. The entries summarize contributions from the areas of assessment, artificial intelligence, cognition (including schema theory), instruction,…