This article offers a way to show students how authors play a significant role in shaping nonfiction information to achieve clarity and coherence.

While social studies educators suggest that social studies instruction can and should be taught both through literacy-integrated delivery as well as independently from other subjects, many elementary classroom teachers often find that school expectations or district mandates leave little instructional time for any subject that is not specifically…

It is a challenge for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to integrate language, social understanding, and emotional intent of messages to understand their social world. They often have deficits in language and social cognition and difficulty interpreting and labeling emotions and incorporating or integrating each of these aspects of…

Discusses Julia Kristeva's notion of text--the tension between the semiotic and the symbolic--and how the tension can be made visible through typeface variation and other shaping techniques possible with word-processing software. Shares ways the author encourages students in first-year English classes to explore possibilities for incorporating…

Historically, research has shown that a reader's recall of ideas from text is enhanced when the reader uses relations among concepts to organize information. Text structure is a term used to describe the various patterns of how concepts within text are related. Knowledge of text structures assists a reader to comprehend text by allowing the reader…

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)