A study was conducted to determine whether there was any match between student perception of reading ease and the readability of three main line, first-year college composition texts (Daugherty; Kinneavy, McCleary, and Nakadate; Lauer, Montague, Lunsford, and Emig) as determined by five commonly used readability formulas. Two chapters (on…

To determine whether less able readers could use the strategies they had been taught, a study investigated the transfer effects of training in the use of graphic organizers and summary writing on readers' recognition of the compare/contrast text structure. Subjects, 70 freshmen at a western New York state college of liberal arts and sciences in a…

Graphic organizers (also referred to as structured overviews, mapping, webbing, or pyramiding) are visual aids which depict the relationships among concepts in a text and which reflect the organization of the text. Five patterns of graphic organizers--cause/effect, comparison/contrast, time/order, simple listing, and problem solving--reflect the…

Identifying the main points of a communication is fundamental to successful reading comprehension. Discussed are difficulties in defining main idea, text structure variables in determining important information, textual hierarchy and the theory of macrostructure, text features signalling important information, summary writing, learning-disabled…

Encouraging teachers to utilize procedures and techniques that help their students become active, willing lifelong readers, this handbook has been compiled to serve as a guide for integrating the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment's (PSSA) definition of reading as a dynamic, interactive process into classroom practice. The handbook…

This paper first gives a brief chronological overview of reading theory development and a short introduction to schema theory, and then comprehensively reviews, comments, and synthesizes research-based studies, published between 1980 and 2002, that examined the effect of text structure (reader effect and text effect) on L1 and L2 reading…

Examines the "levels effect" (the theory that more important text elements are more likely to be remembered than less important elements) in children and adults when reading expository text. Finds differences between adults and children in the extent to which they engaged in the type of processing that resulted in levels effects. (MG)

Examines the differential effects of reading guides on text comprehension and the transfer of strategies learned through the use of the guides to new material. Finds that students using reading guides had higher comprehension test scores and greater transfer than those who did not. (SR)

The predictions that 48 students with deafness in grades 4-8 made while reading narrative text were analyzed to explore the influence of the children's expectations for text structure and content on reading comprehension. Findings indicated that interacting at a deep level with narrative text was more related to reader characteristics than to…

Examines differences in language ability between normally achieving students and learning-disabled students with reading comprehension problems. Poor comprehending students differed from normal achievers for all language measures and in the manner that reader- and text-related variables predicted comprehension. Results supported the positive role…

Reviews research in revising instructional text by examining multidisciplinary research in readability, text structure, text interestingness, expert revisers' strategies, and readers' comprehension strategies. Finds that much of this research is limited by a simplistic view of reading, the use of experimentally contrived texts and contexts, and a…

Second, fourth, and sixth graders were given passage of text whose material could be represented as four-level class inclusion hierarchy. Students were asked to construct external representation of passage and answer questions that required them to reason about contents of passage. Quality of representation and performance on question tasks were…

Effects on comprehension of a text structure used primarily in science and mathematics to present principles and associated proofs were studied for 70 undergraduates in 3 experiments. Results suggest that the usual proof-first structure is more difficult than a principle-first structure and results in less complete text representation. (SLD)

The effect of equations in scientific proofs on readers' comprehension was studied. Forty college undergraduates solved unfamiliar physics problems with or without a traditional series of related equations. Verbal proofs produced better responses than did equation-based proofs. Equations in proofs cause readers to shift attention away from…

An approach to teaching and testing advanced French reading comprehension of expository social science texts is presented within a "communicative-cognitive" framework. Learners receive instructions that encourage them to perceive and use the writer's overall rhetorical scheme as a conceptual-functional framework for integrating the components.…