This report describes the design and operation of a computer readability service at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon, which has evolved from a program containing a single readability formula to its present six-formula capacity. The daily operation of the service and the results provided by the computer are described in detail, and…

This paper analyzes the order in which subject, verb, and quote come in sentences in the children's stories about Babar by Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff. It suggests that different constructions have different functions that are exploited by the author for communicative purposes. The paper adds that the order in which these elements appear affects…

A study of the reading rate and comprehension of 10 aerospace engineers and analysis of the readability of sample company communications were undertaken. The Nelson-Denny Reading Test comprehension scores for the engineers, when compared with scores of a norm group provided by the Nelson-Denny Test Manual, were nearly the same in mean and standard…

To teach adults successfully, methods and techniques adapted to their needs must be used. Research in adult education has concentrated on the efficiency of techniques in facilitating learning and has been most significant in the areas of readability and audiovisual aids. Research on readability has shown that heavy, involved style makes for…

"A Psychological Study of Flexibility in Reading," the first in this collection of four articles, attempted to determine how flexibility in reading develops from elementary to junior high school. The results indicated that children in every grade in this experiment were flexible in reading, that is, they changed their speed of reading…

Individualized reading is the attempted match between the competence of the reader and the readability level of the text. This booklet, to be used as a guideline for selecting the appropriate books for each child, contains a detailed discussion of individualized reading, an explanation of individualized reading stages, criteria for selecting…

This bibliography, intended as a supplement to a previous bibliography (see ED 099 830), includes 152 listings of articles, books, papers, and dissertations containing a significant cloze component. Entries are listed alphabetically by author. This supplement includes 152 entries, making the total of entries in the original bibliography and this…

This bulletin presents four papers on how to control, manipulate, and predict the readability of printed materials. The first paper describes trends in readability brought about by research tools developed by psychologists and linguists. The second paper explores the effects of word frequency in printed materials on comprehension and concludes…

Major investigations have shown that children care little for social studies as a school subject. Therefore, a closer look was taken at social studies textbooks in order to ascertain if the reading difficulty of the texts was an important cause behind the children's dislike. This study evaluated the reading levels of 41 social studies texts…

Two studies were conducted to investigate the use of a technique for providing a grade-level interpretation for cloze readability scores. In the first study, Bormuth's cloze-test criteria were compared with the results of the Fry and Dale-Chall readability formulae. A total of 133 students in grades 4 to 8 were required to read a 250-word passage…

This booklist is intended for elementary school science students with high interest and low vocabulary skills. The Spache Readability Scale, Dale-Chall formula, sentence structure, paragraph flow, illustration, and diagram analysis or publishers stated grade level were used to determine grade level designations. The included interest level varies…

A distinction is made between the learnability and readability of text materials. Learnability refers to the extent to which new learning results from reading a passage; readability refers to the extent to which a passage is comprehended. Cleraly, comprehension can occur without new learning. Classic readability formulas use text characteristics…

The use of the cloze procedure as a method of determining relative readability was first introduced by Wilson Taylor, who contended that the cloze procedure was a superior method of determining readability since it measured a facet of readability called concept load. Authorities have accepted cloze tests as valid and reliable instruments capable…

Recent research in syntactic complexity has described and specified structural characteristics that distinguish levels of syntactic density. A computer program, written in Programmer Language I for the IBM 370 at Pennsylvania State University, has been developed to apply a syntactic density formula to samples of natural language and provide a…

The building block theory of language structure, an information processing approach, is applied to the development of a model of the reading process. Specifically, the model is concerned with the amount of time an individual will spend reading and the amount of content he will decode which is determined by a series of cognitive processes involving…