Describes an approach to the utilization of news items and ads from a local newspaper in the culture and civilization classes of a French language program for foreign students. Suggests criteria for the selection of materials by students and provides examples of "grids" that facilitate the content analysis of texts. (MES)

Explains how education majors try to learn to recognize thought unit sentences (ThUS's) and to gauge their difficulty. Shows examples of simple writing and discusses the task of writing ThUS's to match style and level of author. Gives a rationale for doing a readability analysis in this way. (FL)

Outlines a teaching unit based on the use of the telephone, with activities aimed at easing the difficulties experienced by foreign speakers. Among these difficulties are problems of comprehension due to the absence of visual clues, the use of special formulas, and the characteristic speed of delivery. (MES)

The study evaluated two kindergarten predictive instruments, the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests: Readiness Skills and the Teacher Estimate of Kindergarten Pupils' Abilities, by following the same 107 kindergartners over 1, 2, 3, and 4 years using multiple regression analysis. (Author/SBH)

Variation in syntactic difficulty in arithmetic problems is studied to determine its influence on students' ability to solve problems correctly. Findings in a study of elementary school students indicated syntactic difficulty affects problem solving ability, regardless of sex (f=fiche number). (MH)

The construct validity of reading comprehension test items was studied in a two-stage process. Five characteristics of task difficulty were defined and a heterogeneous set of 52 items were rated for these characteristics. Then correlations were obtained between ratings and item difficulty data. (CTM)

A model of reading comprehension focuses on eye fixations, which are related to the level of reading processes--words, clauses, and text units. Longer pauses are associated with greater processing difficulty. This model is illustrated for a group of undergraduate students reading scientific articles from "Newsweek" and "Time" magazines. (GDC)

Describes a study in which seventh-grade students achieved higher scores on a cloze test after reading stories that contained their own names and those of people and places familiar to them. (MKM)

Reports on reading research studies conducted in Great Britain during 1979, noting that two areas have attracted much more attention recently--reading comprehension and the importance of motivation. (HOD)

A study to determine the effect of 50 percent compression rate of speech on teacher comprehension revealed that there was no significant different in comprehension by teachers listening to audio tapes at a 50 percent compression rate and those listening at a normal speech rate. (LRA)

The study examined 120 bilingual Mexican American and 24 monolingual Anglo American (pre-K-1) children's comprehension of 26 relational concepts by manipulating the natural language to separate and evaluate cognitive and linguistic variables. Six hypotheses were proposed as operating principles applicable to, but not necessarily limited to,…

Investigates the relationship between maturity of moral judgement and perception of maternal and peer attitudes in Brazilian sixth- and seventh-grade boys. (CM)

This article presents a set of listening exercises designed for students of English as a second language who will take university level courses in science and technology. (CFM)

Three activities used with first-year French students are described: (1) drawing pictures by following directions which demonstrates knowledge of subjects and prepositions, (2) reading a poem in French and rewriting it in French prose, and (3) learning numbers through role-plays involving money. (PMJ)

An investigation of a saturation advertising campaign to acquaint the public with changes in radio wavelengths showed that repeated presentation of material does not lead to learning unless appropriate encoding occurs. Such encoding will occur when subjects are allowed to use previously acquired learning strategies. (PMJ)