When children begin formal schooling, their fundamental communication skills, speaking and listening, are well developed but limited in scope and range; it becomes the teacher's task to assist the children in achieving communicative competence. A developmental project called "Developing Communicative Competence in Children" identifies four…

The study prepared reading tests in the children's first language, Spanish, that initially considered their comprehension of the language and subsequently evaluated their skill in drawing inferences or pertinent information from the material read. Two reading comprehension tests (Forms A and B) were constructed, using two different excerpts from…

This collection provides a number of perspectives on the central role that language plays in reading comprehension. Following an introduction by the editor, entitled "Attention and Individual Differences in Comprehension," the following papers are presented: (1) "The Line of Sight Approach," by Norman H. Mackworth; (2)…

This two-part paper emphasizes the importance of language enrichment and active listening skills as a basis for reading pleasure. While acknowledging the need for developing fundamental decoding skills, the first section advocates that adults read aloud to children from books reflecting the adult's reading interests, containing creative language,…

Designed to provide materials which the high school teacher can use to teach some of the basic reading skills or as supplementary reading material, this guide is composed of thirty-five articles of general interest which are vocationally oriented, followed by exercises designed to test comprehension and to teach reading concepts. The articles have…

This paper describes a series of experiments and research paradigms designed to investigate language development, specifically semantic, syntactic, and communicative development in children. Included are discussions of two studies of semantic development which examined developmental changes of word meanings. Also discussed are three studies of…

Volume 1 of the final report of Project FAST consists of reports on 13 experiments concerning: (1) the application of associative learning strategies to the development of a basic sight vocabulary among mentally retarded children and adults, and (2) the development of text reduction techniques designed to facilitate comprehension and recall of…

The intensive reading instructional centers in Hartford, Connecticut, provide reading services to over 500 pupils in the third, fourth, and fifth grades. Reading teams consist of a reading consultant, two master teachers with strong backgrounds in reading, and a part-time clerk-typist. Instruction takes place in eleven-week cycles. Each teacher…

The competence of school-aged, black children in standard English (SE) grammatical forms, specifically, six verb structures that distinguish Black English from SE, is the focus of this study. The subjects were 198 kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade black children who attend four Title I schools in the New York City metropolitan area.…

This study compares the effect of the objectives-based test collections of the Instructional Objectives Exchange (10X) on reading comprehension and word-attack skills of fifth-grade students in a basal reader program. The 10X, a nonprofit educational organization, was established in the late 1960s to provide educators with instructional materials…

The contents of this publication are intended to provide exercises in reading which require a type and a level of interpretation similar to that demanded by the test of General Educational Development. These exercises were also designed to reinforce the reading skills outlined in a previous publication, "Developing High School Equivalency…

The three objectives of this study were to evaluate the following: a test of literary judgment for use with community college students, the free responses of students to passages in the test, and the use of original literary selections and distortions of them as a classroom tool. The test of literary judgment used original poetry and prose…

This selective bibliography is one of nine documents compiled to provide titles and descriptions of useful and informative reading documents which were indexed into the ERIC system from 1966 to 1974. The 280 entries in this section of the bibliography concern the reading process and are arranged alphabetically by author in one of the following…

This paper attempts to enact Rivers' (1971 and 1972) urgings to base ESL listening instruction on both psychological and linguistic findings and contends that advanced ESL students' listening needs call for improvement in processing spoken English discourse. Psychological data on memory span is cited to demonstrate that advanced ESL students…

The need for improved measures is particularly acute in reading because, in spite of the magnitude of time and effort which continues to be invested in reading, there is no insurance that the outcome is indeed proportionate to the effort involved. How much of the educational system's performance relative to its own goals is measured by a…