The purpose of this study was to investigate the cognitive and multimodal strategies used by adolescent students as they read comic texts and traditional prose texts. This study looked at the strategies employed by adolescents in an eighth-grade English class. The cognitive and multimodal strategies that the participants used while reading were…

Unlike desktop computers, reading in virtual reality allows the reader and the information to cohabit in the three-dimensional space. However, virtual reality typography rarely exploits the new affordances three-dimensionality offers. This study addressed the need to understand the contributions of spatially distributed layouts on expository text…

As is well known, the Insular Celtic languages (Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Breton and the now-extinct Manx and Cornish) utilize a class of verbal abstracts known as "verbal nouns" to perform the functions that are fulfilled in other Indo-European languages by infinitives and supines. Yet in many ways the Celtic verbal noun remains somewhat of an…

The goal of this dissertation is to develop a connection between poetry and teacher education. I am motivated to undertake this project because poetry is an underappreciated resource, one that has a good deal to teach teachers. Specifically, I believe that poetry can teach teachers about how to creatively and democratically respond to problems of…

This study examined the effectiveness of repeated readings in four second-grade classrooms in two urban elementary schools in Northwest Ohio. As determined by the Ohio Department of Education, 75% of the students in each building must score at or above the proficient level. For the 2008-2009 school year Building A, a school within one of Ohio's…

A study examined how both children and adults process inferences when reading prose. Subjects, 24 third-, fifth-, and eighth-graders, and adults, read stories where a consequence was implied, and then answered questions. The stories differed in the degree to which the inference was necessary for comprehension, and the readers engaged in either…