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"There is no stage in a person's growth and development when he can say: 'I have mastered reading.' In fact, 'Learning to read,' as the philosopher-poet Goethe aptly said when he was eighty, 'is a life-time process. I have been at it all my life, and I cannot yet say I have reached the goal.' To accept these findings of research in reading means change, a change for the teachers, the pupils, the citizens and the community. While waiting for these changes to be implemented it seems opportune to make a beginning. And so, without the aid of a reading expert of consultant, with only slight outlay of material, and without noticeable change in the school curriculum, a reading experiment which set as its goal, general improvement in reading was initiated in the ninth grade English class. There were several purposes of the study, and while the most important was to improve the reading abilities of the pupils, definite goals were set up in three major types of reading. Particularly stressed were (1) developmental reading with its activities in which learning to read was the main goal, (2) functional reading which included all types of reading to get information, and (3) recreational reading with activities designed to encourage enjoyment and appreciation. Throughout the experiment each of the three types of reading was stressed, yet, there was more or less a balance kept among them"--Introduction. / "August, 1956." / Typescript. / "Submitted to the Graduate Council of Florida State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science." / Advisor: Dwight L. Burton, Professor Directing Paper. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 54-59).

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This research consisted of three individual studies, examining intra- and inter-modal haptic and visual processing in able learners and reading disabled children spanning the elementary school grades. / Performance was measured in terms of: accuracy scores, haptic exploration scores, and exploration times. Higher scores were obtained on the intra-modal visual condition than on any of the conditions involving a haptic component. Increasing the exploration times for haptic stimuli did not significantly improve performance on tasks involving a haptic component. / Performance scores of poor readers were depressed on all tasks, suggesting a general deficit in sensory processing rather than an inter-sensory processing deficit. Poor readers further employed less sophisticated haptic exploration strategies than able readers, suggesting use of less efficient task strategies.

This thesis has dealt with reading comprehension problems of nonnative speakers of English as determined by an analysis of responses to a cloze test. Because it has been proven to be sound both theoretically and empirically for use in determining reading comprehension problems of non-native speakers, a cloze test was administered to two classes of students at Ball State University who were studying English as a second language. The study was a descriptive one in which responses to the test were first categorized and then analyzed to determine possible reasons for errors.Results of the study indicated that these respondents approached the cloze task at the syntactic level. They were able to respond acceptably when the blank to be filled occurred in a syntactic structure that they were familiar with. The large number of clearly incorrect responses indicated that the test was probably too difficult for them. However, an analysis of the errors proved useful in determining the most prevalent kinds of errors and in examining the syntactic structures which caused the most problems for these respondents. The study concludes with pedagogical implications for the respondents in this study and implications for future research.

In this study I examine twenty-five reading textbooks published in America between 1785 and 1819 for their rhetorical theory, pedagogy, and approach to language in order to discover more about the origins of modern writing instruction. The reading textbooks were selected for popularity, needing to go through at least three editions. I also examine four early writing textbooks, all published 1816 and earlier, and compare them to the reading textbooks on the same points.My results show that the dominant rhetorical theorist before 1800 is James Burgh, and not Hugh Blair. After 1800, rhetorical theory in these textbooks is dominated by Blair and John Walker. An emphasis on grammatical correctness is inherent in both writing and speech instruction, meaning the public associated grammatical correctness with writing instruction even in the eighteenth century. Correctness went beyond grammar into vocabulary and pronunciation because language instruction was primarily a matter of imitating the upper class. The reading textbooks, designed for teaching speech, show no evidence of the transition to writing instruction that occurred in the nineteenth century. My examination of the writing textbooks shows that writing instruction developed separately from speech instruction because the elocutionary pedagogy dominant in these years could not be applied to writing instruction. The early writing textbooks have the same emphasis on grammatical correctness, and add inventional schemata that are wholly absent from the reading textbooks. / Department of English