In the first year of a pilot program, 18 New York City schools are digging into new ways to accomplish two objectives emphasized in the common-core standards: (1) engage students in increasingly complex texts as they move through school; and (2) help them conquer literacy skills specific to disciplines such as history and science. Spearheaded by…

Critical thinking skills are crucial for both academic and everyday life. This paper presents the author's Text Analysis Matrix (TAM), a model for developing skills for the critical examination of texts. The TAM guidelines involve finding and clarifying the main claims of a text, discovering and assessing arguments, uncovering the implications for…

Writers carefully include critical information in the opening lines of their chapters, but students often gloss over these beginning sentences, missing information that could help them better comprehend the text. To address this concern, the authors created a strategy that prompts students to examine the opening lines of chapters, helping readers…

Efforts to improve civic education face a conundrum. On the one hand, students report that they are more likely to learn about democracy and citizenship through reading textbooks than through any other activity and according to the National Education Association, reading is the gateway to learning in all content areas. However, reviews of textbook…

Suggests an approach to the analysis of mathematical texts that makes use of linguistic theory to provide insights into how the language of a text may influence the ways in which readers make sense of it. Focuses on the ways in which teacher-readers may make sense of texts produced by students. Contains 33 references. (DDR)

For much of this century, text linguists have recognized that various tokens called "metadiscourse" may help explain how texts function. In linguistics, metadiscourse has a more concrete meaning than it typically does in composition: it refers to specific words, phrases, and clauses which are primarily intended to help the reader…

A study considered the tasks for beginning readers posed by currently available beginning reading programs. A set of guidelines for evaluating beginning reading texts was identified. According to the model used, such texts should be "engaging, accessible, and generalizable." These guidelines were used to examine the literature components…

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…

Investigated is a reader's ability to comprehend written text that is highly novel with few semantic cues. The theoretical perspective, assessment theory, materials and methods, and the results of this study are discussed. (KR)