Children need to learn early that reading can give them new ideas and change old ideas. Pupils are all too often evaluated in terms of their ability to express what they know rather than what they think. Thoughtful reading can be done from the very beginning of reading instruction. Effective questioning practices will develop this ability. The…

The effects of specific directions on the reading comprehension of sixth-grade students were investigated. Two passages on different topics, each with 20 percent of the sentences relevant to the topic, were materials for two informal tests administered to 92 six-grade students. Half of the students were given specific directions to learn about the…

Shows how a content area teacher can help students relate prior experiences to the new information to be gained through the reading assignment. (MKM)

Presents guidelines that enable classroom teachers to help mildly handicapped students develop two types of text lookback strategies and offers a series of explicit teaching activities that emphasize direct, student-centered instruction. (HOD)

The study found that instructing 13 learning-disabled junior high students in the necessary prior knowledge (information and vocabulary concepts) led to superior reading comprehension performance. Textually explicit text structure also improved reading comprehension. (DB)

Discusses guided reading as an approach that teachers can use to help young students better comprehend what they are reading. Notes that guided reading allows teachers to talk, think, and read through a text with children, offering questions, comments, and prompts to the children to stimulate their interest and understanding. (MDM)

Research on second language learning has found similarities between the reading strategies of first and second language readers. These findings are being applied by second language instructors and researchers in reading classrooms through a variety of strategy-use activities. Most foreign language reading specialists view reading as interactive…

A study investigated whether comprehension of a text could be enhanced by careful structuring of the lesson elements surrounding it. One group of ten second grade children received a reading lesson as prescribed in a basal series that directed attention to irrelevant content while failing to highlight consistently important story elements. A…

The student of English as a second language in the French school system is confronted with morpho-syntactic and lexical difficulties when he or she reads texts on the university level. In addition to these difficulties, the method of approaching the text may also prove to be a problem. A method is outlined to help the student achieve an active and…

Materials used in a one-day conference on teaching reading comprehension skills are summarized in this publication. Contents consist of three articles on teaching the comprehension skills, informal reading inventories in science and in geography, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address with comprehension questions, a checklist for the evaluation of teaching…

ReQuest is a reciprocal questioning technique in which the teacher serves as a model of questioning behavior for the student. Following a briefing period by the teacher, the activity begins with the student and teacher silently reading the first sentence of a story. Teacher and student exchange questions on a sentence-by-sentence reading of the…

Discusses aspects of reading research besides schemata theory and applies them to second language (L2) reading research. A technique is presented to introduce comprehension monitoring to students, and studies use reciprocal teaching and think-aloud procedures and appropriate L2 applications for each. (LMO)

Describes a comprehension questioning strategy, based on R. Stauffer's Directed Reading-Thinking Activity, that enhances students' use of reasoning on the basis of prior knowledge. (FL)

Concludes, among other things, that teacher-set prereading purposes in a basal reader directed reading activity have a definite value and should not be treated lightly nor implemented casually by teachers as they do seem to facilitate comprehension and that basal reader teacher guides should do a better job with regard to such purposes. (FL)