Designed to alert adult basic education teachers to the factors of readability and to suggest ways that some readability problems can be alleviated, this resource unit discusses the problems posed by readability formulas and suggests that teachers must both press for more readable adult texts and question intelligently the products of publishers…

Two experiments were conducted to distinguish empirically between the interactive and noninteractive models of reading. In the first study, 18 undergraduates divided into three groups by reading ability read stories in an RSVP mode. Two variables were manipulated within subjects--rate of presentation and amount of text presented per unit of time.…

Working on the assumption that poor comprehenders of reading cannot retrieve relevant information to provide a context for the understanding of new information, a study sought to gather some empirical data about the retrieval of information. It was hoped that these data would validate some aspects of J. R. Anderson's ACT theory of memory (that…

Written for those who would like to seriously and systematically study response to literature and the teaching of literature, this book presents a review of the major theories that might inform research on response and a catalog of most of the promising research techniques. The book is organized into three parts: theories of response, ways to…

Through reflections upon the ideas and events that have shaped current views about reading comprehension and its teaching, this paper characterizes patterns of development in three related domains: theory and research about basic processes in reading comprehension, research about reading comprehension instruction, and practices in teaching reading…

Education has often created and widened the distinctions between reading and writing rather than focusing on their relationship. More recently, however, research has advanced a view that recognizes reading and writing to be instances of communication between people. Research also suggests that five kinds of knowledge (informational, structural,…

Recent research projects demonstrate that pictures in reading textbooks have a negative effect on the word-decoding ability of young readers. This particular study questioned whether the relative difficulty of the words being read determines the effect that pictures have on good, normal, and poor readers. After pretesting to determine reading…

This document lists reading research studies undertaken in Britain in recent years. Studies undertaken for higher degrees in British universities, funded by institutions such as the Schools Council or the Department of Education and Science, or conducted as part of the work of schools' remedial or psychological services are listed. Each listing…

This is the final report on a research project that measured the effect of reading rate on accuracy and the efficiency of reading comprehension. At the outset of the project, existing research data were integrated into a comprehensive account called a "rauding theory," which interrelates reading ability, passage difficulty, reading time,…

The altercue continuum is a theoretical arrangement of oral reading responses which deviate from the expected responses, arranged according to their relationship to reading comprehension. Elements from miscue research, including phoneme-grapheme correspondence, serve as principles for organizing altercue types according to comprehension. Semantic…

In a study using eye-voice span (EVS) measures to determine the relationship between the types and numbers of transformations in sentences and the predictability of the sentences for readers, sentences with varying types and numbers of transformations were embedded in paragraphs projected onto a screen and read aloud by the subjects, 20 graduate…

The role of visual imagery in the learning of letter-sound combinations was investigated using such mediating images as two scoops of ice cream for the letter "m." In a preliminary study, high-, medium-, and low-strength mediating images were determined for each letter-sound combination. The 216 kindergarten subjects in the main study were…

There are many children, termed "perseverative," whose reading comprehension problems stem from the fact that they form hypotheses about the meaning of a text at the onset of reading, then fail to evaluate or modify those hypotheses on the basis of subsequent text findings. A study was undertaken to identify such readers and to explore…

Explanations for differences in reading proficiency should be constructed around an atlas of reading-related individual differences in cognition. Such an atlas should include well-documented "bottom-up", text-driven reading strategies and less thoroughly investigated "top-down", schema-driven reading strategies. Research…

A theory of textual processing signals--cues to guide the response of any reader to a narrative text--can be evolved from Gerald Prince's theory of reading interludes and William Labov's work on narrative evaluation. An examination of these signals in two personal experience narratives written by students in remedial and freshman writing courses…