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)

Explores the participation in reading-writing workshops of students who consider reading to be an important part of their lives. Finds students who are engaged readers of fiction bring a set of expectations that differ from their teachers' and from students who do not read regularly for pleasure. (NH)

A preliminary study set the groundwork for exploring the challenges secondary school teachers and students face in reading texts drawn from their own culture and from cultures quite different from their own. Interviews were conducted with 89 secondary school students, and also with university teachers and secondary school teachers of African…

A study compared the literary response and character attribution processes of 40 undergraduate students on the basis of differences in their interpersonal construct repertoire, or "interpersonal cognitive complexity." No studies to date have explored the ways in which cognitive complexity influences readers' overall responses to…

A study generated a system for describing and analyzing the shifting focus from reader to text in written responses to literature, and explored the stances that readers adopt as they focus on personal, textual, and extra-textual concerns. Ten proficient and 10 less proficient undergraduate readers engaged in open-ended, exploratory written…

In what appear to be grand saccadic leaps, research on reader response has turned first, at the beginning of the century, to the external reality of the text; then to the internal reality of the reader; and finally to the movement of the response process itself. Three metaphors derive from the three successive research orientations: from the…

A study examined how the third version of a questionnaire on readers' backgrounds (developed for the "Folktale project", which explores similarities and dissimilarities in the response to literature from and in different cultures) fared internationally under field conditions which would not immediately be controlled by members of the…

This paper examines the work of Russian literary critic M. M. Bakhtin as a theory of reading. Focusing on two critical essays, "Discourse in the Novel" and "The Problem of Speech Genres," the paper demonstrates how Bakhtin addresses the three elements of a reading theory--language, representation, and interpretation. Next, the…

A study examined similarities and differences between adults' and children's responses to the same children's book, and the role of discussion in shaping adults' perceptions about the book and their understanding of children's responses. Subjects, 129 students in five university children's literature classes, read and responded in writing to…

Empirical research into reading theory suggests people begin a reading transaction with an affective response and then primarily rely on memory. They may elect to use imagination as an option to influence the process, but when the affective response is overwhelming, the imagination lies dormant while memory dominates the transaction. A research…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of reader perspective on encoding, storage, and retrieval processes and how this effect differs as a function of cognitive style. In both experiments, subjects read a passage from one of two assigned perspectives (a burglar or a prospective home buyer) or from no assigned perspective. In the…

The review of the literature related to newspaper reading presented in this paper provides a useful background to educators seeking to broaden their understanding of newspaper research and its implications for classroom practice. The research is divided into readability studies, readership studies, and cognition, comprehension, and text analysis…

Assembled in the course of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project, which examined the nature of collective and individual response to fairytale literature, this bibliography cites materials pertinent to response assessment. Listed by author, the subjects of the approximately 150 titles include language and meaning, poetics, literary…

The theoretical background of the interdisciplinary Turko-Danish Fairytale Project is discussed in this paper. The paper first offers support for the working hypotheses of the Fairytale Project, which was designed to determine (1) if there are aesthetic principles that are universal and that guide the reader's experience of literary works; (2)…