Developed by the Multi-level Captioning Project, the manual provides guidelines for linguistically controlling reading materials for the deaf. An introduction describes the three proposed reading levels based on difficulty of vocabulary, syntax, and inference. Chapter 1, on vocabulary, considers word list sources, guidelines for controlling…

Directors of 100 undergraduate training programs in speech language pathology and audiology were surveyed about the readability level and faculty satisfaction with currently used textbooks. For each of seven fundamental courses, Ss were asked to indicate the academic level at which students typically completed the courses, the textbook currently…

This research thesis, written in Hebrew, tries to apply various methods of measuring readability to ranking the readability of two mathematics textbooks widely used in the seventh grade. The readability was measured by formula, by expert judgment, by cloze procedure, and by comprehension tests. High correlations were obtained between the rankings…

A study of 191 native English speaking working class children in grades two, four, and six was undertaken to investigate the development of reading comprehension of selected pronoun-referent structures. Three linguistic comparisons were made: referent type, reference order, and referent distance. Target sentences were constructed with these…

A comparative-historical perspective was used in analyzing the readabilities of three newspapers and three magazines. A total of 270 100-word samples were collected from the Chicago "Tribune," the New York "Times," the Memphis "Commercial Appeal,""Cosmopolitan,""Atlantic Monthly," and…

A model is proposed that attempts to provide some order for the disparate findings with respect to the effects of signaling in text on recall. The type of signaling examined is that which explicitly cues the relationships among the major propositions in the text structure. It is noted that while it is generally assumed that such signaling is an…

A study of the application forms for Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, public assistance, food stamps, Medicaid, and Medicare was conducted to examine the frequently occurring unfamiliar, specialized vocabulary words. It was found that 76 such words occurred at least ten times in the documents studied. A large number of other…

A CONTINUATION OF A STUDY OF PUPILS' ABILITY TO FORMULATE AND STATE A LITERAL MAIN IDEA IN THE READING OF SHORT, SPECIALLY CONSTRUCTED PARAGRAPHS IS REPORTED. ONE OF THE MAJOR TASKS WAS TO DEVELOP A DESCRIPTIVE PROFILE OF THE MAIN IDEA RESPONSES FOR A GROUP OF 400 SECOND- AND FIFTH-GRADE PUPILS. A 12-POINT SCALE WAS USED FOR THE NUMERICAL ORDERING…

THE FLESCH READING EASE FORMULA WAS APPLIED TO SELECTED SECTIONS OF THE 1965-66 FACULTY HANDBOOKS FROM 61 CALIFORNIA AND ARIZONA JUNIOR COLLEGES IN AN EFFORT TO DETERMINE WHETHER THEY WERE WRITTEN IN A STYLE TO PROVIDE MAXIMUM OPPORTUNITY FOR COMPREHENSION. THE HANDBOOK SECTIONS STUDIED WERE (1) INTRODUCTORY MATERIAL, (2) GRADING POLICIES AND…

The aims of the social studies curriculums include growth of the pupil in social competence and awareness. In order to permit the teacher knowledge as to what social studies materials best contribute to the development of those aims, this study evaluated the readability level of three second grade social studies textbooks. (1) "We Have…

The readability levels of 15 popular magazines were determined by applying the Flesch, Farr-Jenkins-Paterson, Gunning, and Fry readability formulas to the lead articles of each. Average grade levels found were 13, 14, 12.2, and 10.9. Probability intercorrelations between the easy-to-difficult rankings yielded by the four formulas were all…

The relative importance of vowels in reading versus the relative importance of consonants was investigated by comparing the scores on the oral reading of a passage from which all vowels had been removed with the scores on the oral reading of the same passage from which all consonants had been removed. Scores for reading the passage with whole…

One of the ways to handle the increasing demands on readers' skills is to make writing more readable. The problem has two different aspects: predicting how readable writing will be to a reader, and producing writing that is readable to that reader. Prediction is relatively simple, and can be done statistically with readability formulas. Production…

The purpose of this study was to determine the proportion of words that the Dolch list and the word list for the 1970's accounted for in written materials. The two word lists were compared by token comparison--a method by which words are weighted on the basis of frequency of occurrence within a given set of materials. The written materials used…