Theories of learning and attention predict a positive relationship between reading times on unfamiliar words and their learning; however, empirical findings of contextual learning studies range from a strong positive relationship to no relationship. To test the conjecture that longer reading times may reflect different cognitive and metacognitive…

This essay is about the improbable emergence of written language six millennia ago that gave rise to the even more improbable, highly sophisticated reading brain of the twenty-first century. How it emerged and what it comprises--both in its most basic iteration in the very young reader and in its most elaborated iteration in the expert reader--is…

The "acceleration phenomenon" (AP) is defined by improvements in reading speed and reading comprehension, induced by an artificial text fading procedure corresponding to the previously determined fastest individual reading rate. Recent results, however, indicated that fading that is slower than the self-paced reading rate can produce…

Reading as thinking, the key to reading maturity, flexibility, and efficiency, is dependent upon the reader's purposes and his repertory of reading skills. Instruction should begin with the teacher's evaluation of the reader's functioning skill level, his psychological characteristics, and the nature and quality of his stored information. Skillful…

Part of a section, "4 Reading Techniques that Work.

Reports that second-grade students in reading groups that used materials without pictures had faster mean reading times than students who read the same materials with pictures, but did not differ from them in comprehension or achievement. (FL)

Two sources of information are involved in reading; the visual information picked up by the eyes from the printed page and the nonvisual information, or prior knowledge, that the reader possesses. An overreliance on visual information leads to an overloading of the cognitive process involved in reading and loss in comprehension. Overreliance on…

Presents six diagrams that describe what happens when a text is read. (HOD)

Asserts that it is important to develop a fast rate of reading, discusses how children remain slow readers for years after they have learned about letters and sounds, argues that there is no need for even a beginning reader to read slowly, and proposes some methods to improve reading. (Author/JM)

The first section of this two-part collection of articles contains six papers and their discussions read at a symposium on Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading. The papers cover the linguistic, perceptual, and cognitive components involved in reading. The models attempt to integrate the variables that influence the perception, recognition,…

The word-identification approach has long been the basis for teaching reading in both native and second languages. Recent work has a new approach, particularly that of Frank Smith, who developed a feature analysis model of reading. As we can identify letters in different configurations or before all the strokes are completed, so can we identify…

Research on children's oral reading errors provides evidence that both top down and bottom up processes interactively contribute to reading. Syntactic and semantic expectations are sources of information for top down processing, while knowledge of letter-sound relations provides information for bottom up processing. As children learn to read,…

Reading instruction for the college student learning a second language should begin by establishing symbol-sound-meaning association. The step from speech to reading could best be made at the structural level. The emphasis at this point should be on sentence structure and the student should be taught to develop the ability to interpret the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The seven titles deal with the following topics: (1) the prediction of reading comprehension from critical thinking skills, cognitive thinking skills, and meaning vocabulary with college freshmen; (2) the effects of instruction in…