Many students from elementary school through college encounter difficulty understanding their science textbooks, regardless of whether they have language disorders. This article discusses some of the particular difficulties associated with science text comprehension and possible remedies for facilitating and enhancing comprehension of challenging…

This article discusses methods for evaluating students' content-area literacy skills. Four specific factors that affect content-area literacy are described: vocabulary knowledge, topic knowledge, text structure knowledge, and textbook readability, along with methods of evaluating each of the factors. Most of these methods have not yet been…

A study examined 52 stories for grades 1-6, randomly chosen from 10 American and Canadian literature-based reading series containing well-known selections by well-known authors. The study compared the reading series selection to the original story cited in the series acknowledgments, seeking patterns of difference in wording, paragraph structure,…

A study examined the first grade materials in five new basal programs submitted for the 1993 Texas state adoption. (The programs were those of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; Houghton Mifflin; Scott Foresman; Macmillan/McGraw-Hill; and Silver Burdett Ginn). These series are compared with program materials currently in use in the state. The analysis…

A study was conducted to examine the relationships of four areas of textual design factors that are relevant to external students' learning as they use their course study guides: the micro and macro textual features, the linguistics, and the instructional design elements. Twelve external students from two units at the Gippsland Institute were…

Provides an overview of the potential of hypermedia as an instructional medium and discusses research that has investigated learning outcomes. Discusses instructional design considerations to guide developers and designers of hypermedia systems, including learner characteristics and elements of content presentation such as text structure,…

Explains the details of a method of teaching text structure that proved successful in improving both reading comprehension and summary writing of fifth graders. Reports that students quickly learned how to attend to and remember main ideas from problem-solution passages in their textbooks and how to write summaries. (MG)

One of the most important, and most studied, aspects of human perception is the act of reading. Reading has received much attention from researchers, both from a human information processing (HIP) approach and as a common, practical act that needs to be optimized, especially in the realm of human-computer interaction (HCI). One of the text …

These instructor's materials consist of a handbook directed to the teacher and 33 worksheets teachers can use with adult students in order to use the cloze procedure to assess how readily they can read materials of differing complexity. The handbook introduces the materials by considering such questions as What is meant by reading?, How could…

This article discusses how text variables interact with reader, strategy, and task variables to affect readability, including text coherence, text organization, signaling, and text structure. It considers how classic readability formulas, in concert with consideration of text, text reader, and strategy variables, can be used to match texts to…

A contrastive textlinguistic study of rhetorical differences between texts written by academics with different cultural backgrounds is described. The results indicate that Anglo-American writers use more metatext or text about text than Finnish writers, suggesting a more reader-oriented attitude among Anglo-American writers. (27 references)…

Examines advantages and disadvantages of using textbooks as the basis for curriculum and instruction, discussing textbooks as the predominant instructional medium. The article describes attributes of good textbooks and text structures, identifies strategies for improving readers' text comprehension, and notes teachers' role as facilitators in…

A study examined the relationship between text schemata and comprehension monitoring to determine elementary school children's detection and remediation of internal inconsistencies in narrative and expository passages. Data were elicited (through computerized experimental reading passages containing internal inconsistencies) from 87 students in…

Discusses strategies that teachers can use to support children with and without disabilities in comprehending reading material. Factors contributing to text readability, language learning for students who are deaf or hard of hearing, and strategies for in-class text reading and independent text reading are described. (CR)

This paper examines visual and affective factors involved in the reading of foreign language texts. It draws on the results of a pilot study among students of post-compulsory school stage studying French in England. Through a detailed analysis of students' reactions to texts, it demonstrates that the use of "authentic" documents under…