Examines the effectiveness of combining two cognitive strategies, self-questioning and prediction, for a range of students reading below grade level. Finds that the use of these combined strategies improved reading comprehension of both slightly and severely disabled middle school students. (SR)

Discusses the use of content area textbooks and indicates that content textbooks are difficult for students to understand because the books generally are not well written. Offers solutions for how to use content textbooks and illustrates how lessons can be created through the integration of tradebooks and through discussions in which critical…

A study of 78 women in Tilzapotla, a small Mexican town with an unusually strong commitment to education, examined decontextualized language and literacy skills related to oral and reading comprehension of health information and to speaking skills during a health interview. Length of schooling was related to most skills, but all measured skills…

A study investigated the English vocabulary knowledge of 324 first-year students at an Indonesian university. Results indicate that on average, students had some knowledge of 1226 English words, far less than the 3000-5000 word range widely considered a threshold level for independent reading of unsimplified texts. Only a small portion of students…

The Dyslexia Training Program, a remedial reading program derived from Orton-Gillingham methods, embodies principles of structured phonetic instruction, drill and repetition, and multisensory methodology. Following the two-year program, dyslexic students (N=22) demonstrated significantly higher reading recognition and comprehension than a control…

Presents an overview of the components of content-area reading instruction (word identification, vocabulary, and comprehension) and describes instructional strategies that can be used to teach middle and high school students with reading disabilities how to approach content-area reading. Tips for selecting textbooks are also included. (Author/CR)

Examines the effects of exposures to children's literature through reading aloud and an inferencing strategy on low-reading-ability fifth-grade readers' sense of story structure and reading comprehension. Uses an experimental/control group repeated measures design. Finds that this study is consistent with other research that indicates the…

Investigated the role of phonological and orthographic processing skills in second-language reading of 60 native-Farsi-speaking English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) graduate students. Three types of ESL reading variables were used: reading and comprehension, silent reading rate, and ability to recognize individual words. Efficiency in phonological…

Examined the effects of Bright Start, an early-education program for providing children in Israel with the cognitive tools for school learning, on first graders' cognitive performance and achievement tests in math and reading comprehension. Found improvements in the test group's performance over all measures. (JPB)

Examined types of simplifications made in four authentic texts used in the second-language classroom, and investigated if there were differences in recall scores based on whether students read simplified or authentic versions. Findings indicated that a high percentage of modifications made were lexical in nature and that recall scores for…

A review of 17 studies on computer assisted instruction (CAI) in reading interventions for students with learning disabilities found most CAI programs employed drill and practice procedures, followed by strategy instruction, then simulation. The focus was split between word recognition and reading comprehension, followed by language/vocabulary,…

Examines extent to which assessment of text comprehension involves knowledge of the properties of human cognition and the context of assessment. Shows that assessments of the quality of the answers varied based on the perceived human or artificial source of the answers. Provides copies of experimental questionnaires in the appendices. (DSK)

Contents of 800 elementary, middle, and high school textbooks published from 1919 to 1991 were analyzed with regard to their levels of difficulty. Following World War II, there was a major decline in schoolbook difficulty which may have led to the subsequent decline in SAT-verbal scores. (MAK)

Presents two activities based on the poem, "Cat in the Snow," to help beginning readers learn to decode print and develop fluency. The first activity has students look at the poet's words. The second activity has students talk about the poet's language and message. A tear-our sheet offers the poem, "Cat in the Snow." (SM)

A longitudinal study of 363 elementary school students over five years investigated the degree to which reading comprehension, vocabulary, reading pleasure, and reading frequency later in life can be predicted and the way that path models and common factor models explain these relationships. Linkages among these factors are explored. (SLD)