ABSTRACT
Research indicates that young children and low ability persons are less likely than older or more able persons to engage spontaneously in meaningful or elaborative processing of verbal material including text material. The evidence indicates that over a wide range of verbal tasks, including word lists, sentences, and prose passages, performance is strongly facilitated by diverse procedures that have in common the requirement that subjects meaningfully process the material. Verbal Efficiency Theory would have to predict that improving these students' decoding should allow improvements in comprehension. A. S. Palincsar and A. L. Brown focused on teaching four skills – summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. Palincsar and Brown identified many poor readers with such low decoding fluency that they were poor risks for comprehension-strategy training. J. R. Frederiksen used computer games to provide instruction on three components of reading skill – perception of multi-letter units, phonological decoding of orthographic information and use of context frames in accessing and integrating.
