The effects of subtitling during transactional task practice were investigated among fifth-semester college students of French. Results support and advance the knowledge generated by language research on subtitles: subtitles help learners not only to comprehend authentic linguistic input better but also to produce comprehensible communicative…

The effectiveness of the "Laubach Way to Reading" program was examined with four adolescents with learning disabilities who were reading below the fifth-grade level. Students made significant gains on basic reading skills and comprehension. Students' success depended on being provided with supplemental lists of more challenging words…

Shows that intermediate learners of German whose first language is English experience more semantic difficulties when reading an English text and more syntactic difficulties when reading a German version of the same text. A stronger emphasis on syntactic features, such as word category, agreement relationships, tensing, and word placement in the…

Presents a study conducted to provide a comparative analysis of five item analysis indices using both IRT and non-IRT indices to describe the characteristics of flagged items and to investigate the appropriateness of logistic regression as an item analysis technique for further studies. The performance of five item analysis indices was examined.…

Reports five experiments; the first two assessed the effect of the selectional restriction requirements of verbs and the animacy of nouns on sentence comprehension, the third determined the cause of the interaction found in the first set of studies, and the fourth and fifth were self-paced reading experiments. (52 references) (Author/CK)

Addresses the question of how computer-assisted language learning should be designed to promote second language lexical fluency. The discussion reviews findings in the psychological literature concerning the nature of lexical development, the transfer of appropriate learning, and the conditions that promote automaticity in skilled performance. (43…

Considers the benefits of extensive reading, examines some of the reasons for its failure to take off, describes two programs, and offers teachers some leading questions to help them develop their own programs. (three references) (Author/CK)

Provides suggestions for elementary school teachers to use shared reading experiences with their students. Notes that having teacher and students read together encourages classroom discussion, models appropriate reading behavior and pronunciation, and encourages children to think about the book or story. Other benefits of shared reading are…

Investigated the interrelationship between meaning construction and testing tasks in English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) tests written in both Hebrew and English taken by 28 Israeli 10th graders. Results found that the testing task functioned as an additional information source that was used by the students to develop mental models of English…

Reports on the second phase of a cognitive study of multimedia and its effects on sixth graders' learning that focused on the relationship among text, animation, and captions. Results show that a combination of text plus animation and captions resulted in greater recall, inference, and comprehension. (Author/LRW)

This paper argues that using intelligence as an aptitude benchmark in defining reading disability conceals unsupported assumptions about educational potential and makes it difficult to differentiate the cognitive characteristics of dyslexic children from those of other poor readers. The use of a more educationally relevant aptitude measure such as…

Reading comprehension training using the Question Answer Relationship (QAR) strategy approach was conducted with 23 third-grade children. Following QAR training, classwide peer-assisted sessions were held to practice asking and answering questions. Results found that all children improved their individual question generation and question answering…

This study of 26 children (ages 8-12) with hearing impairment found that the degree of hearing loss and spoken language competence independently affected the ability to understand the information presented on commercial and educational television programs. Language skills were a stronger predictor of comprehension than the degree of hearing loss.…

This study of the effectiveness of the Project Success Summer Program found that the eight-week program improved dyslexic adults' (n=63) reading and spelling scores in five areas. Results indicated that training in phonological skills improved decoding skills and that passage reading rates and individual word reading rates best predicted…

Discusses how students generate meanings for mathematical word problems, develops a generative predicational model to account for students' comprehension of word problems, and describes an empirical study of Israeli sixth graders that was designed to test the model. Talk aloud protocols of the students are analyzed, and hypotheses tested are…