Reports a study showing that reading comprehension of college students who were poor readers increased when passages were rewritten editing out abstract nouns and verb-nominalizations and replacing them with either concrete nouns or full verbs, but that comprehension of average and good readers did not change with the revisions. (TJ)

Horizontal readability, the analysis of essentially similar passages through classification of words and phrases according to their cognitive similarity, is discussed in relation to its usefulness in differentiating among materials designed for the same reading level. Three studies of horizontal readability in which passages were rated for high…

Reports on an investigation of the effect of syntax on the comprehension of written English by Thai college students who have studied English as a foreign language. (HOD)

A standardized method, called programed prose, has been developed which can be used to automatically convert prose training material into a form which forces trainees to read the material with at least a minimal level of comprehension. From the results of a series of experimental studies, it was concluded that programed prose facilitates learning…

The effects of training on internal reading flexibility (intra-article flexibility) and the relationships between such flexibility and overall reading speed, reading comprehension, anxiety level, and introversion-extraversion were investigated. Flexibility coefficients were computed before and after training for the total group of 255 college…

Reviews research using sentence length as a factor in predicting readability and discusses the possibility of sentence complexity as a more accurate variable. (TO)

United States Air Force personnel at two levels of reading ability (eighth and tenth grades) were the subjects in a study that measured the effects of three experimental variables on comprehension of two text passages developed from Air Force reading materials. The factors investigated were reading ability, "literacy gap" (the difference in the…

The purpose of this project was to compare the reading levels of students in vocational programs in a two-year community college with the readability levels of the materials they were required to read in their daily learning activities. The Diagnostic Reading Test, Form A, was administered to 120 students in five different occupational courses.…

The readability levels of ten basal readers commonly used to develop word recognition and comprehension skills in learning disabled children from grades 3 through 6 were compared with the readability levels of their accompanying workbooks. (Author/DLS)

Three experiments, in which subjects read passages of variable readability, measured "cognitive capacity usage" (the attention level to reading material) by recording by subjects reaction times in a secondary task (responding to a "click"). The data indicated that the easy texts filled cognitive capacity more completely than the difficult texts,…

Approaches to improving students' skills in reading social studies materials are presented in this book. The first chapter discusses reading problems and orientations to reading in the social studies. The remaining three chapters deal with three problem areas: making a suitable match between pupil reading abilities and instructional materials,…

This report compares a typical newspaper account of an event with other possible ways of narrating the event. It argues that journlists' beliefs about the appropriate format, style, and content for a news story work in concert to obscure the structure of the story and the relations among subparts, and thus serve to thwart their presumed goal in…

The sixth edition of this text incorporates research done in the five years since the fifth edition was published and contains new terminology, new concepts, new illustrations, and new materials. The four guiding principles (breadth of scope, maintenance of a balanced point of view, practicality, and clarity) remain. Chapter topics are reading…