The study found that instructing 13 learning-disabled junior high students in the necessary prior knowledge (information and vocabulary concepts) led to superior reading comprehension performance. Textually explicit text structure also improved reading comprehension. (DB)

Two experiments studied whether 110 first, third, and fifth graders' difficulties in detecting inconsistencies in text were related to their failure to represent inconsistent propositions in memory or failure to compare them although remembered. Shortcomings were related more to difficulties in forming mental representations than in comparing…

Finds that low ability and average ability students benefit more from reading plays than reading stories. Finds that the performance of low ability readers equalled high ability readers when both participated in group oral readings of plays. (RS)

Investigates effects of text coherence and active engagement on students' comprehension of textbook information. Finds a continuum of increased performance from original silent text, to original text with thinking aloud, to revised text read silently, and finally revised text with thinking aloud. (SR)

The comprehensibility, interestingness, familiarity, and memorability of concrete and abstract instructional texts were studied in 4 experiments involving 221 college students. Results indicate that concreteness (ease of imagery) is the variable overwhelmingly most related to comprehensibility and recall. Dual coding theory and schema theory are…

Studies second, fourth, and sixth grade students to answer four questions to determine whether comprehension of anaphora is a strong structural factor in children's personal composition as it is in reading comprehension. Concludes that students' reading and writing are correlated in the frequency and use of singular and plural pronouns. (MG)

The reader's knowledge about how a message is woven into discourse plays an important role in reading comprehension. This article first reviews reasons for student difficulties in comprehension, sentence groups, and sense units and then presents a basic discourse framework and its applications for analyzing text passages. (Contains two…

Story grammar is a recent area of research related to an interactive conceptualization of reading. A study of 70 sixth-grade students studying English as a foreign language (EFL) suggests that direct instruction in story grammar helps students abstract a story's episodic sequence and metastructure. Sample texts are appended. (Contains 21…

Studies empirically the effects on reader performance of reduced text structure in technical writing texts. Reveals that removal of cues to local coherence produced reliable decrements in reader performance. Discusses results with regard to questions of information design. (HB)

Finds that first graders who received direct instruction in awareness of four pragmatic language functions (heuristic, imaginative, regulatory, and personal) evidenced greater recognition and awareness of these functions in narrative than did uninstructed children. Implies that it is useful to cultivate such pragmatic awareness to promote…

Compares the effects of three different methods of improving reading comprehension: text-structure instruction, reading practice, and guided reading. Finds that standardized tests showed no one method to be more effective than another, but that all three methods had measurable effects on reading comprehension. (SR)

Focusing on how teachers can integrate computers into reading/writing instruction, this ERIC digest presents guidelines for helping language arts teachers match their use of computers with what is known about the reading/writing process. The guidelines for computers and reading presented in the digest point out that computer instruction in reading…

During the past century, most research addressing the legibility of text in print has used adult subjects. The study reported in this paper investigated differences in reading rate and comprehension scores of eighth grade students reading from paper copy or computer screen. Three hundred eighth grade students in computer literacy classes were…

To investigate the relationship between reading ability and the detection and repair of text-based (internal) inconsistencies, a study examined 100 college students enrolled in an introductory educational psychology course at a large state university. Based on their performance on the comprehension portion of the Nelson-Denny Reading Test,…

This paper addresses the role of prior knowledge in the comprehension of narrative and expository text, two major categories of discourse. The paper reviews some of the differences in the essence of prior knowledge required to comprehend each text type and then examines research on prior knowledge and conceptual change that deals with both text…