This paper summarizes research findings on academic reading obtained from a questionnaire, two reading tests, and a textbook analysis and discusses essential reading skills required of foreign language (FL) learners in carrying out their academic studies as well as the skills with which they have problems. Results revealed that the essential…

A community college teacher, knowledgeable in composition and reading, worked with content area colleagues on reading and writing ideas for their courses. His "missionary work" included talking to colleagues, demonstrating teaching methods in their classrooms, and writing course materials for them. His main problems involved difficulties in…

An ideal secondary level remedial reading program would be based on the philosophy that both freedom and structure are required, that learning demands involvement and feedback, and that success breeds success. Such programs should be structured (i.e., based on clearly defined content and a clearly designated mode of presentation). There are many…

The decoding behavior of Cindy, a junior high school student of French, was analyzed. An examination of a transcript of her attempt to translate a French passage aloud into English revealed that she was not taking advantage of contextual guessing. During remedial sessions, an attempt was made to discover the best method of helping Cindy acquire…

Due to its abstract, theoretical nature, the mole concept has been recognized as one of the most difficult topics to teach and learn within the chemistry curriculum. The purpose of this study was to chronicle the development of high school students' conceptions of the mole following a period of instruction in a chemistry class. This investigation…

Analysis of 165 studies (representing the testing of 1,418,899 subjects) that reported data on gender differences in verbal ability indicated a slight female superiority in performance. The difference is so small that it appears that gender differences in verbal ability no longer exist. A major goal was also to define age trends in the pattern of…

A survey was conducted with 166 undergraduate students enrolled in teacher education and developmental reading classes to determine student background knowledge in three major areas: study and coping skills; current events, geography, and history; and general vocabulary. Among the findings were the following: (1) Students in both groups spent more…

The effects of review options (the opportunity for examinees to review and change answers) on the magnitude, reliability, efficiency, and concurrent validity of scores obtained from three types of computerized vocabulary tests (fixed item, adaptive, and self-adapted) were studied. Subjects were 97 college students at a large midwestern university…

The lack of emphasis on occupational literacy competencies in most public school reading curricula leaves students poorly prepared for the demands of the workplace. Most jobs require mastery of the following literacy competencies: technical vocabulary; locating and using information; following directions; and self-monitoring of comprehension and…

A study sought to determine if there were significant relationships among preservice teachers' learning style, attitude toward reading, composite score on the American College Test (ACT), declared major, high school grade point average, vocabulary score, and reading comprehension score in predicting performance in a basic skills course in reading…

This study compared the performances of four groups of Hong Kong teachers of English as a Second Language on a language teaching task. Subjects were two groups of native English-speaking teachers, one of expert teachers and one of novices, and two groups of non-native English-speakers, one of experts and one of novices. All were asked to preview…

A study examined the use of cloze procedure as a measure of learning from content instruction. Subjects were 35 physician assistant (PA) students in a cancer prevention course and 31 education students (ED) enrolled in reading instruction courses. Cloze passages were constructed from published selections on the reading process and occupationally…

If a student is to develop reading comprehension, he must possess and activate a number of linguistic and cognitive skills. He comes to the text with certain expectations and uses a cyclical process of sampling, predicting, testing, and confirming to understand it. The overall goal of reading instruction is to produce motivated, independent,…

A reliability study of the Brigance Comprehensive Inventory of Basic Skills (CIBS) is presented. All test-data collectors were provided onsite training in the administration and scoring of the CIBS. The sample included 85 black and 319 white students from grades two through eight, from parochial and private schools, in a southeastern metropolitan…

Language skill attrition refers to the loss of any language or portion of a language whether it be the declining use of mother tongue skills, the replacement of one language by another in language contact situations, the deterioration of language in the neurologically impaired or elderly, or the death of whole languages. In this paper, language…