Examines how cultural schemata influence American and Palauan students' reported strategies and their reading comprehension. Finds that students predominantly use processing strategies categorized under awareness development and intrasentential ties establishment for culturally unfamiliar passages. Finds that students use intersentential ties and…

Investigates whether thematic organizers can facilitate generalizability of ideas from one context to another for low ability readers enrolled in a college developmental studies program. Finds that the thematic strategy facilitated transfer of learning. (RS)

Decoding, working memory, and domain-specific prior knowledge were studied as predictors of comprehension for 48 university undergraduate students after rewriting notes, rereading notes, or rereading a text. Working memory was most important for comprehension of text-implicit information, whereas knowledge was relatively more important for…

Examined the effect of background knowledge and second language proficiency in relation to two sets of specific reading materials. One came from an IELTS reading module related to science and technology; the other was from a highly-specific popular science text. Results showed that both language proficiency and background knowledge predicted…

Sentence comprehension is more than a syntactically autonomous issue and relies on the clues that are not part of the grammar. This paper considers "world knowledge," in this case prior knowledge of the story being read, as one such clue. In section 1, "reversibility" of sentences is discussed. "Sentence ambiguity" is discussed in section 2.…

Recent studies refuting the effectiveness of advance organizers in preparing students to comprehend text material have not met the conditions necessary for advance organizers to succeed. According to the assimilation theory, which holds that people learn by chaining what is known to what is to be learned, the following conditions must be met for…

A study investigated the ability of fifth grade above and below average readers to use mental imagery in reading familiar and unfamiliar text. The subjects, 80 fifth grade students reading either above or below grade level, were placed into either an experimental or a control group. All subjects individually read one familiar and one unfamiliar…

This report discusses how reading instruction should be modified to facilitate the development of comprehension strategies in all children (including those labeled as "at-risk" or "disadvantaged"). Current theoretical views of reading comprehension do not support a discrete skills perspective, but classroom research has…

A study examined (1) relationships between background knowledge and reading passage comprehension, (2) the reliability of a passage-specific background knowledge measure used as the knowledge criterion, (3) the effect of a prereading language and concept organizer activity on available background knowledge, and (4) the effect of that prereading…

To examine the effects of general and specific comprehension ability of a target reading passage and prior knowledge of the subject of the passage, a study examined 182 sixth graders from two central Illinois rural and urban communities. Subjects were given a fifth-grade passage (a 500-word fictional narrative description of the Yanomamo tribe of…

A study was conducted to determine if instruction in schematic aspects of narratives would enhance children's knowledge of story constituents and their interrelationships and to assess the effect of instruction in narrative schema on the reading comprehension of average and below average readers. Subjects were 20 fourth grade students who had been…

The 10 articles in this book examine how comprehension is affected by what the reader brings to the text, the manner in which the text is structured by the author, and the contextual variables that shape the meaning derived by the reader. Specific topics covered in the articles are (1) background knowledge and comprehension, (2) learning how to…

Considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to theories of text comprehension and recall that stress the importance of preexisting knowledge structures or schemata. While the valuable contribution such research has made to the understanding of the reading process and the various disabilities that often attend its acquisition must be…

Describes research done to determine whether there is a statistical relationship between an English as a second language learner's ability to determine a word's morphemes or structural units and his/her ability to comprehend written English text. (SED)

Purpose: The purpose of this action research presentation is to discuss how explicit comprehension instruction can take place along with writing, in the kindergarten classroom. Methodology: This action research project took place in a suburban kindergarten with learners of diverse ability levels and ESL students as well. In this classroom small…