A study investigated the effect of Frank O'Hare's "Sentencecraft" sentence combining program on the written syntactic skills, reading comprehension level, and speed of average ability ninth-grade students. The sample consisted of 75 experimental group students and 68 control group students. Following a pretest, the experimental group…

Professional discourse among educators often includes the use of "slogans" and "generalizations." Generalizations are usually more precise than slogans, which can be interpreted differently and to various degrees. During the implementation of open education curricula in several elementary schools, the evolution of teachers'…

A study evaluated the effectiveness of various models constructed to account for how children read and comprehended a story presented in a directed reading lesson. A commercial directed reading lesson was revised to introduce information related to the story and to help the children form a "map" of the central story content. Data were…

Students in 61 English classes at an urban high school participated in an investigation of the effects of sustained silent reading (SSR) on their reading comprehension skills and on their atttiudes toward reading. SSR calls for a systematic structured time in school for students to read books of their choosing without being tested when the reading…

The Degrees of Reading Power test (DRP) and its related technology are described in this publication. It contains a brief description of the DRP, which was designed to measure the most difficult level of text that a student can read with comprehension; a report on the validation of the test; sample DRP passages; an instructional viewpoint as it…

This guide was developed for parents of young children to help them improve the child's ability to listen, to discriminate different sounds, and to understand and remember what is heard. Background information on the development of listening skills is presented and general guidelines for conducting listening games are offered. Activities are…

The eight articles in this booklet suggest activities designed to help students see drama as an active, engaging pursuit. The first article uses excerpts from Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker" to illustrate how improvisation can be used to help students discover meaning in a play. The second and third articles provide suggestions for…

A technique called "co-communication" was developed to improve the listening skills of dental school faculty. In co-communication, paired individuals take turns playing the roles of talker and listener for designated times, usually about 20 minutes each. The structure of the sessions and their continuity are necessary to ensure individual growth…

Suggestions are presented in this paper to help teachers improve their questioning about students' reading as one way to improve the teaching and learning of reading. The paper first outlines three areas in the teaching of reading--the symbol, comprehension, and pleasure areas--and notes that teacher questions should aim at development in all…

This monograph is the third in a series of semiannual reports of research related to reading in secondary schools. The first section of the monograph is made up of three research studies on the validation of teaching procedures to facilitate students' comprehension of content area texts, the graph-reading abilities of seventh grade students, and a…

Since a review of the literature shows that reading comprehension is primarily a reasoning, thinking process, a procedure called P. L. O. R. E.--an acronym for predicting, locating, organizing, remembering, and evaluating textual material--is suggested as offering a sound theoretical framework on which to base active comprehension instruction.…

Dictations are not sufficient as exercises for developing listening comprehension skills. Other techniques and exercises which have been used in English for Special Purposes classes include practice in note taking, cloze-testing on lectures, mock formal interviews and informal conversations, and discourse analyses of sample lectures. Such analyses…

Issued twice yearly, this journal focuses on materials of interest to teachers of reading at the college level. The five articles in this issue deal with the following topics: basic skills instruction, judging the success of college reading programs, the effect of copying or paraphrasing structurally-cued topic sentences on passage comprehension,…

Instead of urging content area teachers to teach reading skills, reading personnel should be providing them with prereading techniques designed to organize or provide experiences relevant to new concepts to be learned by students. Among the conclusions reached from a review of relevant research are that using multi-leveled textbooks in a classroom…

The described inservice teacher education course is designed for teachers at the middle, junior, and senior high school levels who are interested in developing diagnostic and remediation skills in reading. Included in this informational report is an outline of the textbook contents, activities and resources involved in the course, and ordering…