As part of the Teacher Explanation Project (TEP), a study examined the relationships among third-grade teachers' concepts of reading, the concepts of reading they communicated during instruction to low-level readers, and the students' concepts of reading. Subjects, 20 third-grade teachers, participated in the yearlong TEP study conducted in an…

An analysis of schema theory at the compositional and sentence levels and its implications for Japanese readers of English prose is presented. The study looks at differences between Japanese and English syntax and concludes with five recommendations for English reading instruction for this group. The recommendations include: (1) pursuing the…

A study attempted to estimate the instructional sensitivity of items in three reading comprehension tests in English as a second language (ESL). Instructional sensitivity is a test-item construct defined as the tendency for a test item to vary in difficulty as a function of instruction. Similar tasks were given to readers at different proficiency…

A study investigated the immediate recall protocol as a means of determining what second language learners retain of a spoken text. Three factors in comprehension were considered: topic familiarity, topic accessibility, and topic structure. A dialogue, a news broadcast, and a popular song were all presented to groups of beginning-level students of…

Articles in this eighth yearbook of the American Reading Forum address the dilemmas of teaching reading. Articles, listed with their authors, are as follows: (1) "Deepening a Dilemma: Stylus vs. Computer Writing at an Early Primary Level" (J. Heep); (2) "Concept Maps and Vee Diagrams: Strategies To Deal with the Dilemma of the Restricted…

A study examined the effects of formal and informal learning environments on the storage and recall of lexical items in the first and second languages, paying specific attention to laterality and accuracy rates for tasks of varying difficulty. The study used the dichotic listening task and subjects whose first language was English and whose second…

A study looked at an agricultural extension project in south India to examine comprehension of the extension team's intentionality by the poorest farmers. Subjects, 50 farmers in the village of Porandla in the state of Andhra Pradesh, were interviewed and measured to see if their knowledge and comprehension approximated a constant across all…

Observation has suggested that different subgroups of precocious readers might be distinguished by different patterns of strengths and weaknesses. In particular, it seems that one group of children might be distinguished by the strength of their top-down, conceptually driven processes and another by their strong bottom-up, text driven processes.…

Recent research suggests that an understanding of a simple children's story can demand sophisticated knowledge of concepts, social life, and literary forms. A well-written story for beginning readers will relate goal-directed event sequences in a coherent and relatively complete form, but understanding the story involves processes extending beyond…

A study investigated the effects of nonverbal and verbal classification abilities on reading comprehension. Subjects, 104 fourth grade students, were tested on three measures of classification skill (a shifting of criteria task, a free sorting task, and a three-level hierarchical classification task) and on a measure of recall of relevant story…

Teaching reading comprehension as a process rather than a product demands new instructional techniques. As the psycholinguistic model of reading suggests, readers use prior knowledge and linguistic competence to confirm, reject, or revise predictions on the text's meaning. Methods increasing readers' consciousness of their role in the…

A study examined age differences in the use of interaction management strategies. Students (13 seventh-graders and 24 eleventh-graders) were asked to describe how to play a game to a peer. Each speaker then became a listener in the next dyad. A tally was kept of speaker and listener use of six categories of feedback, and the quality of that…

A study was conducted to investigate the respective contributions of personal and social factors (initial competence and imitation of modeled responses) in children's observational learning of conservation. Subjects included 180 first-grade nonconservers from six schools attended by French-speaking middle class pupils. All subjects failed…

A study was conducted to determine whether high and low ability comprehenders would benefit from induced lookbacks over naturally occurring text. Subjects were 64 tenth grade students selected on the basis of how their self-perceived proficiency matched their actual reading achievement as measured on a standardized test. The subjects were randomly…

To explore how readers create textual meanings or interpretations from written materials, a study that investigated reading from a semiotic perspective was conducted. The study's design was based on the principle of prior ethnography and employed data collection techniques common to field studies: participant/intervention and interviewing.…