In this experiment, New Mexico State University's College of Continuing Education sponsored a college-discovery program designed to tap a pool of prospective college students hitherto ignored: veterans, housewives, and those others who simply were afraid to try for a college education because of uncertainty concerning their capabilities.…

A study examined the skills taught in college reading programs and who teaches them. Questionnaires were returned from 105 colleges and universities across the United States. The data collected were analyzed to show the frequency of response, and the results indicated that (1) reading was taught primarily by persons with master's degrees or…

College freshmen often misread poetry because they cannot read precisely, because the culture and the teachers stereotype poetry as cryptic frill, or because they underread the poem's complexity of response. These problems can be surmounted by using a facets approach to discover the meaning of a poem. Facets illuminate the fact that various poems…

In an effort to combine instruction in study and reading strategies with the study of an academic course, an adjunct course was created by the learning skills center at a major university. The five objectives of the program were: to improve students' studying strategies, to encourage application of strategies to similar courses, to increase…

A study investigated the relationship between phonological features in the oral reading of black West Indians and their reading comprehension. Subjects were 54 college students at the College of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas. Each subject was recorded reading two passages and completed two cloze tests. The tapes then were analyzed for nine…

Teachers are faced with the problem of needing to do a better job of teaching the basics and the astrobasics (those skills needed to understand and respond to the complex bureaucratic demands of the space age, especially reading and filling in such forms as those required for class registration, student loans, and income tax preparation). At least…

The ability to use language as a means of thought expression is a growth process. It is necessary, therefore, for college-level developmental courses to concentrate on strengths stemming from the student's communication in an informal environment, rather than on skill deficiencies reflected in test scores. To achieve this, the teacher must know…

This paper discusses the utilization of role playing and simulation in the training of preservice teachers to acquaint them with the problems of the poor reader. Techniques and teaching procedures discussed include using cryptograms to illustrate the difficulties the poor learner may experience in learning to read, using auditory distractions on a…

The problem of this conference panel was to develop a research and development agenda to improve the reading and writing proficiencies of high school graduates. This panel report consists of four approaches to the problem: studies of the problems of ill-prepared high school students; surveys of the reading and writing tests used by colleges and…

Two stimuli of either small or capital letters were presented successively by tachistoscopic projectors. College students serving as subjects were requested to respond "yes" if the first stimulus (only one letter) was physically identical to or the same name of one of the letters in the second stimulus. The display size of the second stimulus was…

This document identifies the methods used in college level, reading oriented, developmental English courses to build the reading-thinking skills needed for broad comprehension of knowledge. Because the cultural and intellectual environment of the educationally disadvantaged college student may be very different from the cultural and intellectual…

Restructuring of freshman English instruction in an open-admissions institution. (AA)

Introduces a modular reading program for teaching remedial and college level reading courses which takes into consideration that people have different learning rates and styles. (MB)

Shows that reading and writing are closely related. Suggests techniques for integrating these studies in the classroom by writing on open and closed topics, such as readers writing ghost chapters, constructing possible worlds, keeping a reader-response journal, and students teaching punctuation, grammar, and syntax to each other. (RAE)

Asserts that teachers should help students move beyond an information-exchange view of reading to a more complex rhetorical model of constructing meaning. Reports on a study which investigated meaning constructions and compares the more traditional function/feature strategies of constructing meaning with rhetorical strategies, which construct…