The 1976 reading achievement scores of year 5 pupils in Queensland (Australia) primary schools were compared with the scores of year 5 pupils in 1971, using Reading Test QR5. The sample included 1,754 students in 111 primary schools. Analysis of the results showed that scores for vocabulary development, comprehension of implied meaning, and…

Discusses a study of the relationship of Australian elementary school students' word reading strategies to comprehension level, reading time, and phonemic awareness. Reports that performance in reading both irregular and nonsense words is a reasonably good predictor of subsequent performance. Recommends remedial training for students lacking…

Three experiments examined the effect of practice on the acquisition, retention, and generalization of children's skill in rapidly naming visually presented words. Found that, although poor readers did not become as fast as good readers in naming words, they made gains in the time required to access names from print. (PAM)

The authors examined the differences in performance between 30 dyslexic readers in 4th grade, 30 dyslexic readers attending university, and age-matched normal readers for both groups on a lexical decision task to evaluate the underlying factors of dyslexia that persist into adulthood. In both age groups, the dyslexic readers were significantly…

This article presents a reading assessment pilot test that took place in the context of a process of analysis and dialogue aimed at contributing to the analysis of school quality in Peru, as part of a World Bank sector assessment. Peruvian first and second graders at the bottom half of the income distribution were asked to read a brief passage…

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…

A series of six studies of the reading ability of Japanese high school and college students investigated the ability of students to process various literary forms and the types of questions students have difficulty with at different levels of reading proficiency. Over 25,000 students completed various versions of an English reading comprehension…

A study investigated the validity of a second-language student's actual speed of delivery of a passage read aloud as an indicator of second-language fluency. The study, conducted in Hong Kong with 83 secondary school students, used the oral dialogue test in a standardized secondary school-leaving examination. The dialogues were timed and the rate…

Presents a fully incremental model that accounts for attachment preferences by the linear order of lexical heads in the surface structure and their thematic properties. Discusses the principle of "parameterised head attachment" and a serial variant on the basis of three online experiments on noun phrase and prepositional phrase…

This study investigated the ability of temporal processing measures obtained before school entry to predict early reading development in an unselected sample of 125 children (68 males, 57 females). Visual and auditory temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks measured at Preschool (mean age 5.36 years) significantly predicted letter and word…

Investigates the effects of repeated readings of a passage in a foreign language (English) on the ability of slow beginning readers at a Japanese university to increase their oral and silent reading rates. Results indicate that, for practice passages, silent reading rates increased significantly. This transfer of practice effects to a new passage…

This study examined whether factors affecting first language reading acquisition also affect English Foreign Language (EFL) reading acquisition. Hebrew (L1) and EFL reading related measures were administrated to 145 fourth graders from the north of Israel who were beginning their first year of English instruction. Results from a Linear Structural…

Rauding theory states that two factors, accuracy and rate, explain nearly all the variance in the general reading ability of American schoolchildren (Carver, 1999). Using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and regression, this dissertation investigated to what extent the Rauding model could be applied to 92 Japanese university aged young adults…

This article discusses Japanese students' difficulties in reading English, overviews some of the problems of college English textbooks, presents the results of research on the subject, and discusses characteristics of measures of readability. Teaching methods that have proven effective with Japanese students and activities for engaging students in…

Papers on linguistics and language teaching in this volume are the following: "Language in Education: Hard Choices for Hong Kong" (Jo Lewkowicz); "EL2--Medium Education in a Largely Monolingual Society: The Case of Hong Kong" (Nigel Bruce); "A Programme for Semantics" (Laurence Goldstein); "Semantics and Its…