Resisting the will to empathise with a focalised character is assumed to be difficult for young readers, yet empirical evidence on how they actually respond is limited. This paper combines recent insights gleaned from cognitive literary studies with a small-scale empirical study of thirty-five Swedish adolescents reading an Irish short story in…

This research synthesis was conducted to understand the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve learning from informational text for students with learning disabilities in elementary school (K-5). The authors identified 18 studies through a comprehensive search. The interventions were evaluated to determine treatment effects and to…

In this article, the authors show how groups of 2nd- and 4th-grade students in an urban school district responded to a postmodern children's book, The "Three Pigs" by David Wiesner (2001). The students came to the project from basal-based direct instruction, and here they were offered a more constructivist opportunity to engage with a…

Frequently, when assigned to read, intermediate and middle grade students engage in a mindless encounter with the text. Or, try as they may to focus and gather information, they're mostly confused and not sure how to repair the breakdown in their meaning-making. With the new focus on close reading--and on engaging students with more rigorous…

The authors review five major findings in reading comprehension and their implications for educational practice. First, research suggests that comprehension skills are separable from decoding processes and important at early ages, suggesting that comprehension skills should be targeted early, even before the child learns to read. Second, there is…

Gabriela Montserrat (pseudonym) is a Mexican-American child classified by her school district as an "emerging bilingual" and is the focus of this qualitative case study that took place at a public elementary school located in a suburban community in the southwestern US in Mrs Pérez's (pseudonym) second-grade classroom. The student's use…

This study employed eyetracking technology to investigate adolescent students' reading processes as they composed and to explore relationships between these reading processes and text quality. A sample of 32 adolescent students composed narrative and expository texts while eyetracking equipment recorded their eye movements. Eye movements upon a…

Inferences are important because not everything in the text is explicit. Therefore, the reader must generate inferences that fill in "missing" information. Various factors can influence inference processes, including those that are related to the text and reader. Moreover, these two factors are likely to interact in highly complex ways,…

Reading is an extremely active, complex, mental and personal process that concerns both the reader and the text. It is now generally believed that a range of reader with text factors affect the reading process to a considerable extent. So, teachers of EFL need to be aware of the important role of teaching materials. Thus, this study investigated…

This qualitative study analyzed preservice teachers' literacy memories. Each literate person has a history of becoming literate. As university students who plan to be future teachers think about their own literate histories, they begin to construct their own beliefs about learning to read and the teaching of reading and writing. These beliefs may…

In a rural community there is a risk that readers will not find connections to their own lives, which may affect the pleasure gained from reading. The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the use of literature in a small rural elementary school, focusing on how sociocultural factors affect how students connect to and access literature.…

This document describes how the main principles of Perspective Text Analysis are implemented in the PC-system PERTEX, concentrating on the main steps of the analysis. The analysis starts with normal text and ends in a topological representation of the mentality that the text presents. The text material is processed in the following main steps: (1)…

Teacher educators can use active engagement strategies to help teacher candidates interact meaningfully with assigned readings for literacy methods courses. This approach to active engagement with required readings helps teacher candidates learn the content, concepts, and processes from text, and enables them to experience as learners the…

In 3 quasi-experiments using intact classrooms and 1 true experiment using random assignment, students completed partially complete graphic organizers (GOs) or studied complete GOs that covered course content. The partial task led to increased overall examination performance in all experiments. Also, the authors measured students' note-taking…

This paper examines the dual coding hypothesis, a model of the coding of visual and textual information, from the perspective of a mass media professional, such as a teacher, interested in accurately presenting both visual and textual material to a mass audience (i.e., students). It offers an extension to the theory, based upon the various skill…