Test results show that children who are skilled comprehenders are more rapid at oral word decoding than are less skilled comprehenders. (Author/DEP)

Suggesting that the ability to identify words depends as much on contextual information available when one is reading for meaning as on decoding skills, this paper challenges traditional, mechanistic skills approaches to reading instruction. In addition, it contends that comprehending (relating written material to what one already knows) is a…

Noting the limitations of recent word recognition research, this paper suggests ways that these limitations might be overcome and then extends these suggestions into a framework for distinguishing between good and poor readers' ability to comprehend words. The paper begins by reviewing the major models of word recognition and discussing their…

This paper develops a model for generating sets of replicable items for testing a range of reading skills in the primary grades. The procedure is particularly concerned with tests to identify a child's profile in reading achievement and to inform a teacher, principal, or district of the actual level of achievement in reading. Although the model is…

In an examination of elementary school children's notions of reading, 1,122 first through sixth graders were individually interviewed. Each child was asked to define reading, and their responses were placed into four categories: those which were vague or irrelevant, those which focused on classroom procedure or the educational value of reading,…

This paper presents instructional outcomes and student exercises related to the student's acquisition of the reading skills minimally required for comprehension in the SWRL Reading Program. The two outcome areas of the reading comprehension program are the development of word decoding skills and the development of skills necessary for sentence and…

The purposes of this research were to develop a new methodology for measuring comprehension and analyze individual differences in perceiving sentence difficulty. Written descriptions of commonly occurring visual scenes served as the stimuli in the new methodology. The reader's success in drawing a scene after viewing a written description of it…

Shows how older, largely context-free models of reading and its instruction became changed into a multidimensional, context-dependent orientation toward written language and the reading process and concludes with suggestions for using a variety of contextual strategies to increase reading comprehension. (HOD)

This research brief highlights key findings from a study that is a subset of a larger study being conducted jointly by NCSALL's John Strucker and Kentaro Yamamoto and Irwin Kirsch of the Educational Testing Service (ETS). This study builds on the proposition that a reader's comprehension performance is largely determined by his or her abilities in…

Discusses a sequential, three-stage model of how nonliteral expressions are understood, as proposed in recent linguistic, philosophical, and psychological studies. Testing the model's implication that nonliteral meanings of sentences are ignored whenever literal meanings are plausible, finds evidence that both meanings are processed simultaneously…

Five experiments are described that detail both the structure of lexical representations accessed in visual word recognition and the method of parsing words in order to access these representations. The results support a system of lexical access that is not mediated by phonological encoding. (SW)

Examines the relationships among accuracy and latency of word recognition and comprehension by nonfluent readers and whether component letter or holistic processing was used in word recognition by these same readers. (HOD)

Fourteen adults who stuttered and 14 adults who did not participated in a self-paced word-by-word reading experiment. Results indicated that the two groups were not different with respect to speed of word identification but that persons who stuttered retrieved semantic information more slowly than those who did not stutter. (Author/PB)

Explores longitudinal effects of television viewing on 1,050 Dutch children's reading comprehension, causal mechanisms that underlie these effects on reading comprehension, and longitudinal effects of television on decoding skills. Surveys children three times at one-year intervals. Suggests that television viewing inhibited development of reading…

Presents a study designed to measure to what extent secondary school students' ability to guess the meanings of words in isolation is related to guessing words in context. Finds similarities between strategies used in isolated and contextual situations, but the students also made effective use of context. (MG)