One of the key requirements of the Common Core State Standards for Reading is that all students must be able to comprehend texts of steadily increasing complexity as they progress through school. By the time they complete the core, students must be able to read and comprehend independently and proficiently the kinds of complex texts commonly found…

Increasingly, urban and rural centers in Canada are receiving immigrants and refugees from countries affected by war. While it is important not to pathologize the effects that war and other catastrophes may have on individuals, it is also vital not to underestimate their impact on the ability of individuals to adjust to life in a new society. The…

Distinguishes between functional and elective illiterates and attempts to explain the extent and causes of elective illiteracy in Canada. Describes a model of reading activity that confirms expected bivariate associations between elective illiteracy and education, settlement type, language, age, and occupation but reveals three complicating higher…

Matched pairs of skilled and less skilled readers read aloud material in cloze procedure format and printed in geometric transformations. Skilled readers made greater use of grammatical and contextual information. The stability of differences suggests that differential utilization of syntactic and semantic cues contributes to differences in…

Determines whether the oral reading performances of grade three students speaking a Newfoundland dialect are affected by syntactic differences between the dialect and Standard English. (RB)

Examined three factors that influence rereading transfer in children: story relatedness, reading ability, text difficulty. In four experiments, elementary school students read pairs of texts related by word overlap, content overlap, both kinds of overlap, or no overlap at all. Extent to which children benefited from word or content overlap…

In a sample of 506 Chinese adolescents living in Canada from 3 cohort groups, age at the time of arrival in Canada, length of stay in Canada, socioeconomic status, and English reading ability predicted acculturation. The results of the study discussed in this article showed English reading ability and socioeconomic status predicted acculturative…

Children read sets of words under three conditions: with no pictures, with related pictures, and with unrelated pictures. Results indicated that words were read more slowly whenever pictures were present; that unrelated pictures produced more interference than related pictures; and that both effects were inversely related to reading ability.…

A study tested several possible explanations of why the reading literacy levels in Newfoundland and Labrador (Canada) are lower than those in the rest of Canada. Reading literacy was chosen as the focus of analysis for three reasons: (1) the reading score was the most consistent of the three direct measures of literacy; (2) the reading and…

A study examined the reading problems of adults in Newfoundland (Canada) with low reading ability. It explored the genesis of these problems through a retrospective analysis of their lives as school children; and determined the relationship between literacy development and personal background factors, school factors, physiological factors, and…

Examined high school students' scores on test of formal thinking and those on test of reading. Students' success on both tests was disappointingly low. Lack of motivation appeared to be major problem. Correlations between scores on two tests were relatively low, although there was suggestive similarity between distribution of scores for formal…

The aim of this study was to test a hypothesis derived from the Cognitive Clarity Theory which compares Indian and non-Indian children in two localities of British Columbia. It was hypothesized that, in comparison with Indian children, the non-Indian children would show significantly superior performance on objective tests of cognitive clarity in…

Whether external validity of intelligence quotient (IQ) scores from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Revised is moderated by reading ability was studied with 382 Canadian elementary school students. Little evidence was found that IQ scores had less concurrent validity for poor readers. Implications for remedial services provision are…

In this study, we investigated the relationships between rapid naming of letters, digits and colours, and reading ability and executive function. We gave fifty-six grade three and four children rapid automatised naming tasks using letters and digits as stimuli, executive function measures including the Stroop task, a working memory task and the…

Following a review of the literature, a study to provide data on the interference effects of another dialect on aspects of reading performance was carried out in Newfoundland, Canada. Subjects were presented with oral reading material in standard English form and in a form which incorporated selected, validated, morphological features of grade…