For many language learners, listening represents a major source of anguish, with apparent success in the confines of the classroom failing to be mirrored in the ordinary interactions of daily life. One contributing factor may be the continued reliance on listening texts and activities that position the learner as a bystander rather than a…

The act of explaining can help students to develop new understandings of mathematical ideas, construct rules for solving problems, become aware of misunderstandings or a lack of understanding and develop their mathematical communication. Their explanations can also offer opportunities for a teacher to understand more fully what the students are…

The paper provides an example of how immigration is constructed by receiving societies as a comprehension or language problem that requires special solutions. It focuses on the application of Easy-to-Read, a simplified register currently in expansion which addresses different groups of people with intellectual disabilities, to immigrants in Spain.…

The difficulties that students face when reading science texts go beyond understanding vocabulary and syntactic structures. Comprehension of science texts requires students to infer how these texts function as a unit to communicate scientific meaning. To help students in this process, science texts sometimes employ logical connectives (e.g.,…

Reading is critical for scientific thinking. It is a foundation for many of the skills in which scientists and engineers must be proficient, such as conducting research, developing informed conjectures, and engaging in reasoned argument (NRC 2012). Yet, students frequently find science reading difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating. Strategies…

In this article I posit translation as philosophical operation that disrupts commonsense meaning and understanding. By defamiliarising language, translation can arrest thinking about a text in a way that assumes the language is understood. In recent work I have grappled with the phrase "ways of knowing", which, for linguistic and conceptual…

To understand a text, a reader must engage in three important cognitive activities--recognition, comprehension, and memory. Based on this premise, two experiments were conducted with children to assess individual and developmental differences in speed of word recognition and how these differences related to performance on a variety of memory…

Argues that mastery of modal particles is important for interpersonal aspects of language development. The article outlines the difficulty of learning and teaching German modal particles with regard to the theoretical explication. The study shows how a teaching program improved initially poor comprehension and production skills in the area of…

This paper offers a detailed discussion of materials developed for the Chicago Mastery Learning Reading with Learning Strategies (CMLR/LS) program, an upper elementary program in which appropriate learning strategy instructions are embedded within the text for each assigned task. Its purpose is to provide researchers and educators with a…

Modern primary teachers must adapt literacy programmes and ensure efficient learning for all. They must also support children with language and literacy difficulties, children learning English as an additional language and possibly teach a modern foreign language. To do this effectively, they need to understand the applied linguistics research…

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…

To conceptualize a reader's comprehension of text as a semantic and interpretive processing of information, it is necessary to take note of interactions among persons and texts and conditions under which the texts are to be comprehended. A Computer-Assisted Language Analysis System (CALAS) was constructed which focuses on the text as any…

Describes a model that allows children to control the complexity of the speech they hear within conversations on a moment-to-moment basis. Experimental and observational data clearly delineate the reciprocal nature of how speakers "fine-tune" their speech to listeners. The effects of child-directed speech on language development are discussed.…

Gustavson (Gustavson, L., "Journal of Children's Literature," 2000, 26(1), 16) used the award-winning novel "The View From Saturday" (Konigsburg, 1996) to investigate the discourses constructed by adolescent readers in after-school discussion groups. Participants in his study, instead of constructing interpretive discourse as Gustavson expected,…

Four versions of several paragraphs had the same second sentence and were referentially coherent, but they differed in causal relatedness of the two sentences. Results showed that despite referential coherence, recognition and recall memory for the causes was poorest for the most and least related causes and best for causes of intermediate…