Intended to give attention to instruction in reading in the middle grades and beyond, this yearbook includes the following essays: (1) "The Challenge to Education to Produce Literate Citizens" (Alan C. Purves and Olive S. Niles); (2) "The Role of Print as a Medium in Our Society" (Charles Suhor); (3) "The Context of…

A study examined the use of lookback strategy (selective rereading of text material to clarify inconsistent information) employed by good and poor readers attempting to monitor their own reading comprehension. Using microcomputers, narrative and expository texts containing inconsistencies were presented one line at a time on a "page" of…

Written from a psycholinguistic perspective to assist teachers-in-training to prepare for reading instruction in grades one through eight, this book can clarify basic issues in reading as well as supplement current knowledge. The three major parts into which this book is divided examine reading in the "human context," the "teaching context," and…

The purpose of this book is to show how teaching reading involves all teachers. The book first explains how decades of change in Britain have affected school organization, knowledge, teacher education, and the concept of reading. Chapter 2 examines an expanded concept of reading, while chapter 3 explores language development and reading, including…

Methods used to diagnose a seven-year old boy's reading problems illustrate the fact that reading assessments based upon a reader's strengths and a reader's understanding and control of the process will provide information which is more useful to teachers and parents than that provided by the numerical results of standardized tests. After Andrew,…

To understand better how readers learn and recall text information, a study examined one prose learning approach--the selective attention strategy (SAS)--in which text elements are processed, given various degrees of attention, and learned according to their perceived importance. Fifty sixth grade students from an inner city school in a large…

Semantic mapping, which involves the application of vocabulary meanings, increases cognitive processing, and develops the cognitive structure, is recommended for use with literacy students in adult learning centers. Semantic mapping can be used as a prereading or prewriting stimulus, or as a postreading check of comprehension. Also, developing…

A training study, consisting of three treatment cycles for a total of nine 50-minute class sessions, was conducted to determine the combined effect of directed reading-thinking activity (DRTA) and conceptual mapping as organizational strategies for college freshmen of low writing ability. Each cycle included DRTA instruction, mapping, discussion,…

A study assessed the utility and effectiveness of two interactive computer programs designed to instruct and model effective strategies for reading biology and psychology textbooks. Intended for undergraduates, the two programs were developed at Indiana University's Learning Skills Center, and were designed to teach students how to: (1) identify…

The first part of this report reviews an extensive series of studies concerned with the reciprocal teaching of comprehension fostering and monitoring strategies--an instructional method in which an adult teacher and a group of students take turns leading a dialogue aimed at revealing the meaning of the text. The studies reviewed indicate that…

Children who have difficulty reading content materials are sometimes found to read fiction quite well. These children may not have the conceptual knowledge they need to relate the text material to their own lives. Children may experience difficulty reading content texts because they do not actively try to relate to and build knowledge from one…

Two experiments examined the cognitive resources used by readers in sentence modeling (summarizing the propositions in a sentence) as a function of reader task and of sentence complexity. It was predicted that encoding a sentence into memory for later recall would require more cognitive resources than reading a text to answer immediate questions,…

A framework for a college introductory French literature class suggests suitable texts, methods, and activities, with emphasis on communication. In "Problems in Language and Style," students' reading, writing, and speaking skills are developed through the thorough and methodological reading of texts, novels, and plays. (CB)

Strategies for facilitating the reading of scientific textual materials are described, including establishing the reading level of the text, decoding figures and illustrations, recognizing the text's organization, inferring and remembering word meanings, sampling the text and inferring meaning, reading attentively to verify predictions, and…

Investigates the effect of vocabulary-based and generative-reciprocal inference procedure (GRIP) training on third grade readers' comprehension. Reports that the GRIP group outperformed control and basal inference groups on various inferential transfer tasks, indicating that strategies which help students attend to text clues aid in making…