Discusses comments about and responses to an article on semiotics by Donald J. Cunningham in the June 1992 issue of the "Educational Psychology Review." Discusses the semiotic method of juxtaposition, juxtaposing a menace being posed to reading teachers with the menace experienced in W. W. Jacobs' classic ghost story "The Monkey's Paw." (SR)

Describes how prior knowledge, current text, future text, and prior text all play a part in knowledge acquisition. States that most content area reading instruction emphasizes only current text. Notes that future columns will address this issue by introducing a method for teaching comprehension of exposition called "knowledge modeling." (SR)

Discusses the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's reading literacy study in Finland. Shows that, although language-minority students are often expected to have lower achievement in school, students from Swedish-speaking homes in Finland scored almost as well as their Finnish-speaking counterparts on extensive…

Describes the purposes and programs of the national Right to Read effort. (RB)

Reviews research, much of it conducted by the Center for the Study of Reading, on the role of schemata in the process of reading comprehension. (MKM)

Recounts in an amusing style that a colleague of the author has served as his "muse" by sending him materials on reading instruction that might be of interest, and that she often was not amused at how he used her input in his columns. (SKC)

Offers suggestions for (1) teaching college study skills, (2) using magazine and newspaper reports, and (3) outlining topics. (HOD)

Contributors suggest ways to improve students' (1) content area reading, (2) notetaking, and (3) book reports. (FL)

Differences in readers' perceptual style and conceptual temp may influence how they select, perceive, and organize graphic information for meaning. (RB)

Defines areas in which research is needed on the use of audiovisual materials in the classroom. (Author/KS)

Presents a computerized readability scoring system that allows for the calculation and comparison of several formulas with no corresponding increase in teacher effort. (FL)

Produced by leaders of 12 professional organizations, the statement notes that society must reaffirm the value of a balanced education and that basic elements of knowledge and skill are only a part of the essentials of education. (MKM)

Concludes that inferential reading test questions are as likely to be passage dependent as factual test questions. (MKM)

Describes the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests and evaluates their suitability for testing reading, concluding that they appear to be carefully developed survey tests of general reading achievement. (DD)