[book cover]

Reading for Results

12th edition, 2013

A developmental reading text aimed at students who have some basic reading skills but need more help improving and refining those skills.

Publisher: Wadsworth Cengage Learning
20 Channel Center Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02210

ISBN-13: 978-1-133-94571-0
To order this text

In this—the 12th—edition of Reading for Results, I've tried to summarize pretty much everything I have learned about reading over the last thirty years. Although the emphasis on clear, detailed explanations with lots of models and lots of practice remains, I have made two big changes. In the first of those changes, the sequence has been speeded up so that students who are prepared for it can move more quickly into longer readings as soon as they have completed chapter 4, "Getting to the Point of Paragraphs." Students who need more practice with paragraphs would go to chapter 6 first, "Focusing on Supporting Details in Paragraphs," and then move into chapters 5 and 7, both of which focus on multi-paragraph selections.

The second change involves a greater emphasis on showing students how to determine what's important in a reading by telling them to focus on the way key words get repeated or referred to throughout a passage. Using what I call "chains of repetition and reference," student readers construct a main idea and use the topic sentence or thesis statement to confirm their idea about an author's message. This description of the reading process better fits what I see readers doing when they determine an author's message. It also better fits the reading research I've been poring over for years now, always trying to figure out how to make practice and theory match up. I hope you like the changes, and if you do or you don't, I hope you'll write me with comments or questions. As always, I'll do my best to answer them.


Table of Contents

Chapter 1:

Strategies for Learning from Textbooks

Chapter 2:

Building Word Power

Chapter 3:

General and Specific Sentences Work Together

Chapter 4:

Getting to the Point of Paragraphs

Chapter 5:

Getting to the Point of Longer Readings

Chapter 6:

Focusing on Supporting Details in Paragraphs

Chapter 7:

Focusing on Supporting Details in Longer Readings

Chapter 8:

Focusing on Inferences in Paragraphs

Chapter 9:

Understanding the Role of Inferences in Longer Readings

Chapter 10:

Learning From Organizational Patterns in Paragraphs

Chapter 11:

Combining Patterns in Paragraphs and Longer Readings

Chapter 12:

Responding to Persuasive Writing


Putting It All Together

Reading 1:

Communication and Identity

Reading 2:

Is Neutralization Necessary?

Reading 3:

Memory, Perceptions, and Eye Witness Testimony

Reading 4:

Why People Believe Misinformation, Even After It's Corrected

Reading 5:

Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits

Reading 6:

The Rise of the New Groupthink

Reading 7:

The Altruistic Personality


Last update of this page: February 18, 2013

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