This report describes a program for increasing reading motivation and comprehension. The targeted population consisted of two heterogeneous groups of fourth grade students who attended a public school located in a northwest suburb of a large metropolitan area. The students' lack of motivation and poor comprehension skills were documented by low…

Providing a developmental perspective of literacy learning as a way to understand the literacy process, this book describes how children become skilled readers through the following five stages of the literacy growth process: emergent reading, initial reading, transitional, basic literacy, and refinement. Unlike most other literacy books which are…

This practicum used a weekly tutorial program to improve students' written expression using precision teaching as a monitoring tool. Remedial children were referred for instruction by teachers, school psychologists, or parents. The practicum was based on the students' needs for a program strengthening writing mechanics and reading comprehension…

Personalization of word problems in mathematics has been used to increase student motivation and comprehension. Similar techniques may be effective in other disciplines. In the present study computer techniques allowed integration into stories of personalized referents from an inventory of student interests. Stories were produced at three levels…

Four studies investigated when children became able to detect that the words of a story could support multiple interpretations. Each subject saw two eight-sentence stories of each of four types (no-cause, unbiased, biased-proximal, and biased-distal), designed to support multiple interpretations. After reading or hearing each story, the children…

An empirical study is reported that investigated the relationship between first language (L1) and English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) reading in terms of efficiency, speed, and comprehension with Chinese university students of English as subjects. Results indicate that reading speed transfers readily from L1 to EFL readers for those who are slow…

A study compared the effectiveness of computer-assisted reading instruction to that of a direct teaching model. Nineteen adult male inmates from Windham School System's Ellis II Unit (located in Texas) special education classrooms served as subjects. The subjects were divided into two groups each of which spent one hour a day on reading. One group…

A study investigated whether expressive writing facilitated abstraction in language use, thereby improving reading comprehension. Ninety students enrolled in four required basic skills reading courses at a suburban community college in New Jersey were divided into a control and an experimental group. Students in the experimental group wrote…

This curriculum guide, designed for use with secondary migrant students, contains activities in the reading areas of structural analysis, literal comprehension, inferential comprehension, vocabulary, and reading in the content areas. Within these four broad areas, activities are presented in the following specific skill areas: (1) hearing…

This annotated bibliography summarizes approximately 600 reports of reading research identified between July 1, 1990, and June 30, 1991. The research studies described in the book are categorized into six areas: (1) summaries of reading research; (2) teacher preparation and practice; (3) sociology of reading; (4) physiology and psychology of…

The Nihongo tutorial system is an intelligent tutorial system designed to use a computer to assist scientists and engineers in developing reading competence in technical Japanese. It consists of three applications: the Nihongo Tutor, which provides useful information about an article (translation, syntax, pronunciation) to help understand the text…

This document contains a curriculum guide for teachers and a companion reading guide for adult literacy students reading at the fourth- to sixth-grade level. The curriculum guide contains three chapters: Work, Families, and Housing. The guide takes student interest as a starting point and asks students to stretch comprehension, perception, and…

An action research project investigated the effect of reciprocal teaching instruction and use on the comprehension of seventh-grade general English students. Reciprocal teaching is a form of dialogue structured around four skills--question generation, summarization, clarification, and prediction. These techniques are used in small group…

A study investigated how Hispanic bilingual students' knowledge of Spanish vocabulary and awareness of Spanish-English cognates influence comprehension of English expository text. The subjects, 74 upper elementary school students literate in both Spanish and English, were tested for vocabulary knowledge in both languages. After reading four…

A program to improve sixth through eighth grade underachieving students' reading comprehension was developed. Students were identified by comparing their anticipated and actual national percentile scores on the Test of Cognitive Skills (TCS) and the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS). A survey of students' reading behavior, a review of…