A study was conducted to explore the effect of systematically modifying story structure propositions and pronoun antecedents on monolingual, English-speaking students. The study was a replication of earlier work that had involved bilingual students. Thirty fourth-grade students were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Those in the first…

Traditionally, reading disabled children have been characterized as suffering a performance or process deficit that prevents them from acquiring the knowledge and skills underlying proficient reading and comprehension. Such explanations raise some logical problems. Process oriented theories do not adequately explain the specificity nor address the…

A study was conducted to investigate the ability of children to determine meanings of derived words that have undergone a pronunciation shift while retaining a close orthographic relationship to their base words. A researcher-designed test was constructed using derived words that had their base word included in a "core list" of words at or below…

Findings suggest that (1) dyslexia is more prevalent in the United States than in Italy, (2) reading disabilities are strongly associated with disorders of verbal processing in both countries (although some American dyslexics also show visual-motor deficits), and (3) there is a greater dissociation between reading comprehension and decoding in…

Analysis of research involving reading comprehension ability in a second language shows that problems with illocutionary force, logical connectors, and modifiers indicate that many students are either unable to draw on a culturally appropriate memory schema for reading comprehension or have preconceived notions about word meaning that prevent them…

This book is designed specifically for preservice and inservice teachers who wish to improve their reading-language arts instruction. Topics discussed in the sixteen chapters are: the reading-language teacher's role in an age of change; a communication framework; dynamics of language; children's language development; reading-language programs;…

The work reported here is part of an ongoing project to develop a language comprehension assessment instrument that: (1) is sensitive enough to pinpoint the particular language phenomena that are causing difficulty or have not been mastered, and (2) is also broad enough in scope to provide a credible and useful description of language proficiency.…

The approaches used for reading instruction in the United States and in the People's Republic of China are different and incompatible. In China, English reading is taught intensively, through close-reading or detailed oral analysis of brief texts and with great attention to individual words and phrases. This "bottom-up" processing style,…