Once upon a time, nonfiction books for children routinely included concise, stodgy writing. Most of the books were text heavy, with just a few scattered images decorating, rather than enhancing, the content and meaning. But nonfiction has changed dramatically over the last two decades, evolving into a new breed of visually dynamic, engaging texts…

In this article, "havruta," the dominant strategy for textual higher learning where pairs pour over texts slowly to decipher and argue about the meaning with each other, is explored as an appropriate pedagogy. The author describes how to facilitate interpersonal and textual skills in the middle school and high school classrooms. Texts…

Critical thinking skills are crucial for both academic and everyday life. This paper presents the author's Text Analysis Matrix (TAM), a model for developing skills for the critical examination of texts. The TAM guidelines involve finding and clarifying the main claims of a text, discovering and assessing arguments, uncovering the implications for…

Writers carefully include critical information in the opening lines of their chapters, but students often gloss over these beginning sentences, missing information that could help them better comprehend the text. To address this concern, the authors created a strategy that prompts students to examine the opening lines of chapters, helping readers…

Teachers can use comics for reading instruction by capitalizing on their colorful graphic representation. Technology and reading are wed during the use of the Internet, and readers must rely on their visual literacy skills--a group of vision competencies people can hone for comprehension. This article reports on strategies for developing visual…

This article offers ideas as to how students can collaborate as they learn about and utilize a variety of text types (also known as rhetorical modes). The article begins with explanations of the teaching of text types and cooperative learning. The longest section of the article consists of examples of ways that students can use cooperative…

POSSE, an instructional procedure for a reading comprehension curriculum, structures classroom dialogue about text meaning. Students with mild handicaps predict what the story will be about, organize their knowledge, search for the text structure, summarize, and evaluate. POSSE's successful application is dependent upon effective lesson dialogue…

Describes an undergraduate student module that was developed at the University of Exeter (United Kingdom) in which students made their own computer graphics to discover and to describe literary structures in texts of their choice. Discusses learning outcomes and refers to the Web site that shows students' course work. (Author/LRW)

Describes two experiments conducted to investigate the effects of notetaking format on achievement. Students constructed and studied different types of notes: partial (framework and partial notes), skeletal (framework with no notes), and control (no framework and no notes). Found that, based on an application test, students who completed and…

Presents the results of two studies where children were taught to identify textual cues, syntactic and semantic, in order to locate main ideas. The children also built graphic representations of these structures and were taught relevant questions to ask regarding comprehension. Results showed significant improvement, especially with older…

Describes a long-term project where middle school students were taught to visually represent key text ideas through idea-mapping techniques. Instruction was inserted in the content area curriculum along with regular textbooks and supplementary material. Positive effects were found in recall, comprehension, and learning. (MJP)