A study of the effect of regular sustained silent reading (SSR) periods on the reading comprehension and vocabulary of a group of adult students of English as a second language is reported. Sixteen foreign students from 10 countries enrolled at the University of South Florida participated in one of three groups. One group engaged in SSR for ten…

A selection of seven articles on teaching reading to high school students is presented in this report. The topics discussed are: (1) a structured approach to reading expository prose, (2) the effectiveness of sustained silent reading, (3) readability variations in secondary remedial high interest books, (4) the effects of previewing difficult…

Thirty-seven college students with learning disabilities were given a reading comprehension task under the following conditions: (1) using an optical character recognition/speech synthesis system; (2) having the text read aloud by a human reader; or (3) reading silently without assistance. Findings indicated that the greater the disability, the…

This paper used a case study approach to explore the value of an objective procedure to evaluate the relative effectiveness of reading large print and reading regular print with low vision devices for 6 students (ages 8-16) with low vision. Data were collected on oral and silent reading rates, working distance, and oral reading miscues. (Author/DB)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 18 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effect of illustrations on third grade students' attitudes toward the elderly; (2) visual and phonological coding in word processing by fourth, sixth, and…

A study investigated the role of phonemic information in young readers' silent reading comprehension. Subjects, 56 children in grades 2 and 4, from Seattle parochial schools, were blocked into groups based on their grade and skill level (skilled and less skilled). Each subject saw 48 sentences presented in a random order on an Apple II…

To develop a new model of the reading process, a longitudinal study investigated the importance of the concepts of cohesion and register (fiction or nonfiction) in the assessment of text readability. Subjects, 436 8-year-olds (Cohort A), 474 10-year-olds (Cohort B), and 445 13-year-olds (Cohort C) from 23 urban and rural British schools--most of…

Part of a continuing series intended for use by reading professionals interested in understanding and improving the reading of adolescents, this report contains five articles dealing with a variety of subjects. Specific topics discussed in the articles include (1) remedial readers' comprehension during silent and oral reading, (2) recall and…

Concludes that linguistic concept knowledge contributed the greatest amount of unique variance to oral comprehension, silent comprehension, and word recognition at the first grade level, while cognitive style contributed the greatest amount of unique variance to silent comprehension at the third grade level. (FL)

An eight-stage model was developed for implementing a five-month program of sustained silent reading. Data from 65 intermediate grade classrooms (using individual students as analysis units) revealed no significant differences on standardized and informal measures and no significant interactive effects. The teachers' summative evaluation found the…

Reports on the reading habits of native-English speaking and nonnative-English speaking undergraduate college students who completed a reading habits questionnaire. Results revealed that nonnative students read more widely for longer periods of time and had higher perceptions of themselves as readers in their native language than did…

Reading comprehension is a very complex task that requires different cognitive processes and reading abilities over the life span. There are fewer studies of reading comprehension relative to investigations of word reading abilities. Reading comprehension difficulties, however, have been identified in two common and frequently overlapping…

In this action research project, undertaken in a Grade 2/3 classroom, I posed the question: How can I encourage the readers in my class to become reflective and critical thinkers as they read? My aim was to support students in becoming reflective about what they read as well as about the strategies they used while reading, and to support the…

Concludes that students involved in a peer-interaction model and an individual teacher-student conference model of recreational reading instruction obtained higher scores on a reading attitude measure than students in a sustained silent reading and a control model. Students involved in the peer-interaction model received significantly higher…

This study, involving 8 Hispanic males (ages 7-10) with speech/language impairments, found that having the teacher discuss a story's key words and read aloud while students read the story silently was more effective than just having students read orally and more effective than discussing key words and having students read silently. (Author/JDD)