This study conducted with French-speaking students living near Montréal, Canada, assess if teaching the shared knowledge between reading and writing of informative texts improves reading comprehension in fourth grade (9-10 years old) to a greater extent than teaching that separates reading and writing. Teachers participating in the experiment…

Using Mariolina Salvatori's "difficulty paper" assignment to explore student experiences when reading, this paper examines basic writing students' difficulties with reading in the composition classroom. The authors argue that examining difficulty can provide an entry point for understanding how students experience the (dis)connections…

Writers construct meaning when they compose texts, and readers construct meaning when they understand and interpret texts. Building meaning through reading entails organizing, selecting, and connecting. Readers use previously acquired knowledge to operate on textual clues, organizing mental representations that include material they select from…

Suggests that each type of literature presented to young readers serves two important functions: to develop a schema for that literary genre; and to encourage the application of thinking skills in a variety of literary engagements. Presents four related resources from the ERIC database. (MG)

Offers a procedure to help students develop effective strategies for using labeled diagrams in their research projects. (MG)

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)

A review of current research in writing to learn in the content areas provides a basis for focusing on instructional strategies, use of text structure frames, and metacognitive writing strategies. Students can use writing to comprehend to learn content area text in a variety of ways based on their particular learning objectives for that particular…

Explores the nature of the picture story book event from a semiotic perspective. Describes a classroom event in which a picture story book was constructed during teacher-student-text interaction in a second grade classroom using involving oral reading and discussion, interpretations of the main character's traits, letters to the author, and…

While young children's problem-solving models are not as elaborate as those of older students, they share an important belief, namely, that writing and reading are fundamentally purposeful acts of communication. Focusing on the interpretation of process, in particular on writing and reading as forms of problem-solving that are shaped by…

A study investigated how students' mental representation of an expository text and the inferences they used in summarizing varied as a function of text difficulty and of differences in the task. Subjects, 96 college students and students from grades 6 and 10, wrote summaries of expository texts and answered orally several probe questions about the…