Limited research is available on the effectiveness of remedial college courses. The present study evaluated the effectiveness of two instructional approaches for developmental reading courses at a community college in the southwestern United States. The instructional approaches were traditional textbook-based instruction and strategic-reading…

Learning and achievement issues among Foundation Year (FY) students at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCSI) Bahrain have been responded to by the Language and Culture Unit to address the educational problems that have arisen as a direct consequence of the differences in skills students have on leaving secondary school and the skills that are…

Based on the premise that reading teachers have a wealth of creative ideas about what to teach and how to teach it effectively, this book contains the most used and useful lists for classroom teachers gathered together in a desktop reference format. First published in 1984, this third edition of the book includes expanded versions of, and…

A study of the vocabulary and comprehension scores of juniors and seniors at Marygrove College was conducted during the winter term of 1983 in order to determine the reading levels needed for success in upper division courses. Because the research was designed to determine the reading levels needed for successful study, students on academic…

Discusses the common problems encountered by Israeli students in reading specialized English discourse in four different disciplines. (CFM)

Examined whether readers in a third-semester Spanish course--reading the second language on a computer screen--accessed glossed vocabulary more frequently when the glosses were written in their first language or their second language. (Author/VWL)

This word list includes more than 43,000 items, each identified by a simple word meaning. For each item, the list provides a grade level (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, or 16) and a percentage score that indicates what percentage of students at that grade level understand the word. Each word-familiarity score was obtained by administering a three-choice…

The Free University of Iran (FUI) operates by means of a multimedia teaching system, teaching students at a distance and developing a learning environment based near the place of residence or work of its students. This document reviews the development of the Foundation English Course according to the systems approach to instruction adopted by FUI.…

Examines the effects of Urdu, a phonologically transparent orthography with regular letter-sound correspondences, on the development of reading in English. Finds that children with high levels of vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness in Urdu were more likely to do well with English reading tasks as opposed to visual memory tasks. (CMK)

A study of dictionary usage strategies used by 89 college students of Spanish indicated that beginning and intermediate students favored a search strategy based on lexical form, while advanced students used a more successful semantic-based strategy. The data are analyzed against the Vygotskyan theory of human development and self-actualization.…

The effectiveness of an eight week college course for reading/study skills improvement was evaluated by pretesting and posttesting 152 students with the Nelson-Denny Reading Test and the Optimum Reading Achievement Test and running simple correlations between reading rate, comprehension, vocabulary, and 18 variables that included ACT scores, grade…

This study was conducted in the context of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) research to conceptually validate the roles of breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge in reading comprehension in academic settings and to empirically evaluate a test measuring three elements of the depth dimension of vocabulary knowledge, including,…

Makes a case for introducing specialized texts in the English for specific purposes classroom earlier in the reading process. Addresses the question of whether an engineering word list might be a short cut to reading fluency for engineering students, and if so, which words might appropriately be listed. (Author/VWL)

Students at the secondary and postsecondary levels exhibit difficulty in the oral reading of scientific terminology, in part because of the abundance of polysyllabic words derived from Greek and Latin. Some of the problems observed include faulty stress placement, vowel insertion and deletion, vowel discrimination, and consonant insertion. Such…

A study examined the differential effects of previewing textual information with questions containing higher-order versus lower-order information. The 104 college students in the study read three passages, each of which was preceded by different combinations of questions about information high or low in the structural hierarchy of the text, then…