The reader's knowledge about how a message is woven into discourse plays an important role in reading comprehension. This article first reviews reasons for student difficulties in comprehension, sentence groups, and sense units and then presents a basic discourse framework and its applications for analyzing text passages. (Contains two…

Noting that elementary-school students often fail to understand many of the ideas presented in school textbooks, this book presents the Questioning the Author (QtA) strategy, which is designed to establish student interactions with text and build greater understanding by teaching students to question the ideas presented in the text while they are…

Research-based instructional priorities for text organization and curriculum design are reviewed, with special attention to the needs of diverse learners. Research indicates that the physical presentation of text and text structure help students learn information in textbooks and reading materials. Students can apply their awareness of…

This research review focuses on the effects and implications of text organization, both physical presentation and text structure, and on reading comprehension, with special emphasis on the comprehension of diverse learners. The review includes students in kindergarten through college, who are high and low readers and comprehenders; low…