Articles in this eighth yearbook of the American Reading Forum address the dilemmas of teaching reading. Articles, listed with their authors, are as follows: (1) "Deepening a Dilemma: Stylus vs. Computer Writing at an Early Primary Level" (J. Heep); (2) "Concept Maps and Vee Diagrams: Strategies To Deal with the Dilemma of the Restricted…

A study examined the effects of formal and informal learning environments on the storage and recall of lexical items in the first and second languages, paying specific attention to laterality and accuracy rates for tasks of varying difficulty. The study used the dichotic listening task and subjects whose first language was English and whose second…

A study looked at an agricultural extension project in south India to examine comprehension of the extension team's intentionality by the poorest farmers. Subjects, 50 farmers in the village of Porandla in the state of Andhra Pradesh, were interviewed and measured to see if their knowledge and comprehension approximated a constant across all…

Observation has suggested that different subgroups of precocious readers might be distinguished by different patterns of strengths and weaknesses. In particular, it seems that one group of children might be distinguished by the strength of their top-down, conceptually driven processes and another by their strong bottom-up, text driven processes.…

Recent research suggests that an understanding of a simple children's story can demand sophisticated knowledge of concepts, social life, and literary forms. A well-written story for beginning readers will relate goal-directed event sequences in a coherent and relatively complete form, but understanding the story involves processes extending beyond…

A study investigated the effects of nonverbal and verbal classification abilities on reading comprehension. Subjects, 104 fourth grade students, were tested on three measures of classification skill (a shifting of criteria task, a free sorting task, and a three-level hierarchical classification task) and on a measure of recall of relevant story…

Teaching reading comprehension as a process rather than a product demands new instructional techniques. As the psycholinguistic model of reading suggests, readers use prior knowledge and linguistic competence to confirm, reject, or revise predictions on the text's meaning. Methods increasing readers' consciousness of their role in the…

A study examined age differences in the use of interaction management strategies. Students (13 seventh-graders and 24 eleventh-graders) were asked to describe how to play a game to a peer. Each speaker then became a listener in the next dyad. A tally was kept of speaker and listener use of six categories of feedback, and the quality of that…

A study was conducted to investigate the respective contributions of personal and social factors (initial competence and imitation of modeled responses) in children's observational learning of conservation. Subjects included 180 first-grade nonconservers from six schools attended by French-speaking middle class pupils. All subjects failed…

A study was conducted to determine whether high and low ability comprehenders would benefit from induced lookbacks over naturally occurring text. Subjects were 64 tenth grade students selected on the basis of how their self-perceived proficiency matched their actual reading achievement as measured on a standardized test. The subjects were randomly…

To explore how readers create textual meanings or interpretations from written materials, a study that investigated reading from a semiotic perspective was conducted. The study's design was based on the principle of prior ethnography and employed data collection techniques common to field studies: participant/intervention and interviewing.…

Teachers confronted with the task of teaching or assessing listening skills should realize that competence in listening is acquired by knowing and doing and is evidenced by appropriate feedback or response. Various state curriculum and assessment projects have identified and grouped competencies in listening according to function, such as sensing,…

Designed to introduce the study skills needed for college work for students in grades 11 through 13, this teacher's guide provides a series of 12 activity-oriented units, most of which require from 70 to 100 minutes of instructional time. The guide is designed to address a wide range of student needs, allow for the participation of students with a…

The 12 activity-oriented units described in this study skills guide are designed to help students in grades 11 through 13 become more skillful at learning on their own. The guide addresses a wide range of student needs, allows for the participation of students with a diversity of skills, and promotes learning on various levels of competence. The…

A pilot study of discourse in a practicum reading class for instruction in English as a second language examines miscommunication between non-native English speakers. Teachers and their students read transcripts of episodes from classroom discussions and wrote line-by-line analyses of what they understood was being said. Similarities and…