Studies 10 undergraduate university students who were given intensive instruction in metacognitive strategies, which highlighted metacognition and executive control in the reading process. Finds the students (1) understood and applied metacognitive strategies in their personal reading; but (2) applied little of these strategies in tutoring and…

A study of the vocabulary adequacy of college students using words from a daily newspaper duplicated an earlier study using words from "Reader's Digest" which indicated a low level of adequacy. Two groups of 295 and 397 college juniors and seniors in teacher education courses indicated on a list of 80 words taken from a daily newspaper which ones…

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…

Vocabulary test errors made by people with varying levels of vocabulary knowledge might give information about the stages involved in learning a word's meaning. A study used such data to evaluate Johnson O'Connor's proposal that word learning involves four stages and that each stage is characterized by a type of confusion (a mislead). In the first…

Syntactic and semantic cueing were examined as used in oral reading by 30 college freshmen, half of whom were higher in vocabulary on the Nelson-Denny Reading Test and half of whom were higher in comprehension scores on the same test. The subjects were selected from 168 freshmen, all of whom were poor readers and spoke predominantly English. All…

Concludes that when children learned confusable words, their subsequent learning of words was at a faster rate than those children who learned nonconfusable words first, and that high imagery words were learned more quickly than low imagery ones. (FL)

Examines some problems and techniques for teaching prefixes and suffixes at the middle elementary level. States that fewer affixes should be taught, while emphasizing the application of affix knowledge to unfamiliar words. Lists the most common prefixes and suffixes in printed school English for grades three to nine. (MM)

Compares the effectiveness of a traditional vocabulary instruction unit with an alternative unit which applied the concepts of procedural and conditional knowledge to secondary students' word learning. Discusses key characteristics that made the alternative unit successful. (SR)

Investigates the relationship between the relative difficulty of passages and the number of unknown words in passages. Finds little support for the theory that free reading results in large vocabulary growth. Calls into question the practice of devoting large amounts of classroom time to free reading if the purpose is to increase vocabulary or…

Reviews research concerning the preteaching of content area vocabulary. Questions the value of solely preteaching content terms and suggests teaching both general and content vocabulary in ways that aid students in becoming independent word learners. (MG)

To determine if measures of the frequency of English root words can serve as reliable predictors of knowledge of those words, a 98-item multiple choice vocabulary test, in which all of the items were English root words, was administered to 46 third graders and 45 fourth graders. The percentage of correct responses for the words was correlated with…

This study was designed to determine the relationship between sex, race, and the vocabulary development of kindergarten children essential for readiness to read. Fifty-one kindergarten children (twenty-nine males and twenty-two females) from Texas public schools were given the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the vocabulary subtest of the…

The purpose of this study was to construct and evaluate lessons designed to teach a given number of words and the multiple meanings associated with each word. Methodologies employed in the presentation of the lessons were also evaluated. Four treatment groups were established: group 1 used the author-constructed lessons in a team learning…

Examines differences in eighth graders' vocabulary learning from two history text passages with two versions of contextual information. Finds that the "considerate" text characteristics of proximity, connectivity, explicitness, and completeness were important in increasing comprehension. (MM)

Studies the effectiveness of weekly vocabulary studies on students' proficiency in using contextual analysis and students' attitudes toward words and word learning. Finds that students made a significantly greater improvement in their ability to use contextual analysis than did students in a comparison group. Notes a slight increase in student…