Shows that getting involved with a story is the primary dimension of story appreciation, and that different readers interact with the same story in different ways. Indicates that the first-person grammatical device invites readers to identify with the main character, but whether or not they do is a complex function of story properties,…

Ease of language processing varies with the nature of the language involved. Ordinary spoken language is the easiest kind to produce and understand, while writing is a relatively new development. On thoughtful inspection, the readability of writing has shown itself to be a complex topic requiring insights from many academic disciplines and…

Most studies of eye movement behavior during reading have dealt with the processes involved with local aspects of text, such as visual or graphic characteristics or individual word features. To determine if a global level of processing (pertaining to the whole text or to large sections of it) would affect eye movement patterns differently, a study…

Critical language awareness refers to how conscious people are of the ideologies hidden in the language. A study was carried out to determine whether such a critical perspective towards text could be developed in an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) context. This paper evaluates the results of the application of methods of critical discourse…

A group of elementary teachers enrolled in a graduate class in language arts at the University of North Dakota explored how children construct their own meanings as they interact with texts. One teacher regularly read to her 20-month-old grandson, and excerpts from the journal she kept reveal that his understanding of a specific text evolved to…

Papers in this report were presented at a conference on text characteristics, convened as part of the Learning from Text Project. The foreword describes the University of California and California State University Joint Projects Steering Committee project to determine the relationship between ability to learn from text and academic achievement,…

Teaching literature as a basis for teaching writing affords a paradigm for teaching structure and meaning. While a truly integrated English department would put equal emphasis upon composition, language, literature, and reading, two-year college curricula have emphasized composition and challenged literature's place. A reader-based model for…