Examines the variables experienced teachers of deaf children use to make decisions about the difficulty of a text for use by their students and how effective teacher judgment actually is in determining text difficulty. (EKN)

Concludes that the maze procedure tended to overestimate students' ability to cope with an unfamiliar text, while the cloze procedure appeared to be a reasonably accurate measure. (FL)

The authors question the furor over declining reading scores, since their study of the daily reading materials of white collar, skilled labor, unskilled labor, and retail personnel indicated little need for these job holders to function at more than a sixth-grade reading level. (Editor/SJL)

Since there appears to be a direct relationship between reading comprehension and vocabulary, an inventory is offered which assesses students' knowledge of the meaning of "combining forms" (automobile, aero-dynamics, etc.) and not words themselves. The inventory can serve as a model to develop additional inventories for Latin/Greek roots.…

Outlines three constructs of text difficulty: text-based (objective), performance-based (behavioral), and a combination of the two (subjective). (HOD)

Comments on the rationale and methodology of the textual cue experiments of L. T. Frase and B. J. Schwartz (see EJ 203 980) and describes two studies that attempted to replicate and extend their findings using a different methodology. (Author/GT)

Pictorial contents of biology textbooks are examined as factors to be considered in assessing textbook readability. Includes data indicating that effect of color upon the observations and interpretations of photographs varies with the child's ability. Implications for textbook selection procedures are discussed. (CS)

To support the view of readability as an interaction between a text and the reader's prose-processing capabilities, this article applies an extended and formalized version of the Kintch and van Dijk prose-processing model to 20 texts of varying readability. (Author/GSK)

All of the measures require greater reading capability than tests like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory that are designed for use with diverse clinical populations. Unfortunately, some important measures based on promising social-learning conceptualizations of marital conflict were among the more difficult. (Author)

Reviews ERIC documents concerned with the use of comic books in the classroom. (FL)

Full disclosure of ingredients on food, drugs, and cosmetic labels is really non-disclosure where the chemical formulation has no common name or where one generic name covers a variety of formations. The Food and Drug Administration offers suggestions for adult education programs in consumer awareness, understanding compound nomenclature, and…

Seven passages of a published reading comprehension test were administered to college students to compare the regular multiple choice test scores with scores on two forms of a cloze test and with readability formula values. (HOD)

Discusses the meaning of readability, and describes several popular methods of assessing it. Gives the results of the application of one particular method to a selection of elementary astronomy and physics texts. (Author/GA)

Discusses four general areas of linguistics studies that are particularly relevant to literacy issues: (1) discourse analysis, including text analysis, spoken and written language, and home and school discourse; (2) relationships between speech and writing, the distance between dialects and written norms, and developmental writing; (3)…

Reviews an eclectic collection of research evidence on cohesion and redundancy. Notes that much research is in progress in these areas and that there are presently some conflicts in the findings. Concludes that the author's own tentative findings suggest strongly that cohesion and redundancy are important to the linkage between reader and writer…