To determine how frequently various forms of anaphora appear in materials written for children, 1,000-word excerpts were analyzed from the second, fourth, and sixth grade texts of four basal reader series. The basal programs consisted of the "Ginn Reading Program," the "Houghton Mifflin Reading Program,""Scott, Foresman…

The focus of this paper is on some of the difficulties students experience in learning from texts and in solving other types of academic problems, because of their failure to distinguish between skills needed for everyday thinking and those needed for academic thinking. The paper discusses the types of processing problems children experience when…

This manual describes the model--specifically the observation procedures and coding systems--used in a longitudinal study of how children learn to comprehend what they read, with particular emphasis on science texts. Included are procedures for the following: identifying students; observing--recording observations and diagraming the room; writing…

A detailed teaching model designed to develop effective reading skills in content areas (ERICA) is presented in this document. The paper begins with a discussion of the four stages of the ERICA model: (1) preparing for reading, (2) thinking through information, (3) extracting and organizing information, and (4) translating information. The paper…

Citing studies by the National Assessment of Educational Progress and by Dolores Durkin, this paper argues that students are not being taught higher level comprehension skills, such as inference, and presents hypotheses explaining this failure. The paper suggests that emphasis on skills and drills and the typical programed format advanced by…

The advantages of using authentic cultural materials in teaching second languages and the development of productive activities to accompany these materials are described. Based on the notion that comprehension precedes production, authentic texts provide the second language learner with a foundation of concepts and vocabulary from which…

Research suggests that interaction between native speakers (NSs) and second language learners (non-native speakers) (NNSs) is characteristically different from speech between NSs, and that it is the modified nature of NS-NNS interaction which provides learners with optimal input. A study was undertaken to determine whether input and interactional…

Two instructional strategies stress effective reading during science instruction at the middle grade level. One uses print material for enrichment, while the second uses print as the primary instructional medium. Teachers can help students get ready to read in content areas by stimulating their interest in a variety of ways: capitalizing on chance…

Networking or mapping strategies can be used to help secondary school students in remedial reading programs identify and understand ideas and relationships among ideas encountered in their content area textbooks. Essentially, networking and mapping are note taking procedures that require students to represent ideas from texts in some sort of…

Children's attention to and comprehension of television programs were studied by comparing the effects of viewing continuous stories (i.e., those with meaningful plots brought to resolution) and magazine-format programs containing unrelated bits of entertainment. Effects of program pacing were also studied. Multiple programs, differing in content,…

This report describes the development and norming of parallel forms of the Air Force Reading Abilities Test (AFRAT) which have been designed for Air Force use as replacements for commercial reading tests. A previous study on service applicants found considerably divergent reading grade levels (RGL's) from different commercial tests for subjects of…

Factor analyses of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) have typically yielded three factors: two generally understood to reflect basic verbal and performance dimensions and one about which there is no consensus with regard to what is measured. The aim of the present study is to elaborate the meaning of the third factor by…

Students must develop self-monitoring abilities if they are to successfully transfer knowledge and strategies they are taught to their own reading. But first, teachers must know just what this knowledge and these strategies are and how they can be presented to students. Akin to model building, reading comprehension involves a variety of behaviors…

Six practical components of listening comprehension and sources of listening materials are considered. Listening comprehension depends on: (1) the sonic realization or actual physical hearing of language, (2) the segmental/suprasegmental form (phoneme distinction), (3) the musical pitch and rhythm, (4) lexical phrasing, (5) the purpose of the…

The two terms reading problems and learning disabilities are not synonymous. Nevertheless, an increasing number of children who have reading problems are being labeled as learning disabled. Given the growing numbers of children failing to become competent readers, the fact that more and more of these children are being identified and treated as…