The most important skill teachers can communicate through reading experiences is the awareness of what kinds of questions to ask with different kinds of texts. These questions are not the factual questions that drift in and out of short term memory but the implicit questions, the thought-provoking "big questions." Some teachers…

As individuals read, they construct meaning at various levels, including literal, interpretive, and critical. One part of this comprehension act is creative reading, which may be promoted by self-questioning so that students become personally involved in the material they read. To guide students' self-questioning strategies, teachers can both pose…

This paper suggests that by emphasizing word identification skills and oral reading and by using limited reading materials, teachers have neglected reading for meaning. Following a review of current instructional practices, the paper explains how understanding writing depends on the world experience, language knowledge, and processing strategies…

Two studies examined how the factors of content-relevant knowledge and text organization influence students' abilities to study and to remember text information. The first experiment examined the effect of prior content knowledge on students' ability to identify important information in the text. Forty 7th- and forty 11th-grade students, experts…

Noting that a major issue in education today is the concern about students' ability to read critically and to solve problems, this paper describes an analysis of five texts focusing on reading and learning in the content areas to determine what they had to say about critical reading and strategies for teaching critical reading--specifically,…

Because they have difficulty in processing textual material, learning disabled, limited English speaking students, and reading deficient students create special problems for all teachers. Content area teachers can help these students by using a simple three-step strategy. The first phase, labeled TALK, involves prereading, with the readers…

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,…