Reading is an integral part of scholarly practice, though we do not often discuss how our approaches to reading differ, and how these approaches may ultimately make interpretive impact on our research. This essay considers approaches to reading in light of the concepts of proximity and orientation. Though formal "close reading" is a…

Viewed as discourse, official forms exhibit identifiable text characteristics and elicit strategies for comprehension that take into account these characteristics, as well as context and the user's prior knowledge about the world. However, forms also have unique characteristics that require processes and strategies which differ in systematic ways…

Developments in linguistics, particularly in Europe in the work of T.A. Van Dijk, a broader conception of texts that shows promise for the study of reading. Textlinguistics covers a domain of linguistics studies that are involved with texts. Textlinguists are interested not only in those obvious immediate connecting mechanisms, such as anaphora,…

Discusses redundancy in language and proposes an operational definition which could be used in studying the effects of redundancy on communication between writer and reader. (MKM)

Examines the meaning of "Jack and Jill" according to different semantic theories. (MKM)

Paragraphs which contain a topic sentence and other highly related supportive information lead to better comprehension and recall than paragraphs constructed in a less organized fashion. (MKM)

Several theories of story structure are reviewed in this paper, including those of D. Rumelhart, R. Schank, and T. van Dijk. Examples are given of Rumelhart's story grammar consisting of elements such as setting, episodes, events, and reactions that must be present to form a coherent structure. Schank's contribution to story structure theory is…

A model has been developed for studying the relation between text structure and reading comprehension, emphasizing the reader's use of world knowledge and text-structural knowledge to evaluate and interpret meaning from text. When the highlights of the model are considered from the perspective of various expository texts used in research on…

Describes a model that distinguishes seven types of meaning that can function in reading: discoursal, lexical, morphological, propositional, syntactic, rhetorical, and functional. (MKM)

Reviews research which indicates that children should be taught to consider their purpose for reading and should receive feedback on whether they have achieved their purpose. (MKM)

Draws a distinction between two kinds of summarization involved in discourse comprehension: abbreviated versions and brief accounts. English summaries written by Austrian university students are used to illustrate the different degrees of contextualization, or schematic priming, that influenced the amount of processing the students performed on…

Reviews research concerning instructional applications of discourse analysis for student reading and writing, including large-scale studies of student writing, text-based studies, reading comprehension, and semantic mapping. A large unannotated bibliography is included. (CB)

Outlines three basic views of how readers infer causal connections and how they generate causal inferences. Evaluates these three hypotheses with reference to current research in the field. (HB)

Research has identified three reading strategies that are affected in various ways by signaling--the emphasis of superordinate relationships in text. Using a structure strategy, readers follow the text's superordinate relations to focus on the text's message and how it relates to supportive details. Readers who use the detail/list strategy focus…

This paper suggests that teachers concentrate on the ideational and structural properties of text rather than on information acquired from readability formulas when selecting and using texts. Emphasis is given to the importance of context in the analysis of text, and a framework is suggested for examining the text considering the functions texts…