This meta-analysis investigated the extent to which relative metacomprehension accuracy can be increased by interventions that aim to support learners' use of situation-model cues as a basis for judging their text comprehension. These interventions were delayed-summary writing, delayed-keywords listing, delayed-diagram completion, self-explaining,…

This study intends to examine the reading process in Chinese of two young heritage language learners through the use of retrospective miscue analysis (RMA). Retrospective miscue analysis involves both the author and the reader in reflectively discussing the reader's oral reading miscues--responses that differ from the actual text. This study…

Since understanding reading assignments is important to succeeding in school, improving the way that text is arranged in books would be an efficient way to help students better understand the material and perform well on tests. In this study, we asked students to read two original and two rearranged historical passages, in which rephrased…

The Assessment Issue of "English in Australia" has prompted Brenton Doecke to ask himself about significant moments in the history of subject English in Australia when truly innovative work was done in the area of assessing English. There are many examples to choose from, including Brian Johnston's "Assessing English: Helping…

This study explores how child and text clues were related to 31 kindergarteners' word-meaning derivation outcomes for 372 words presented in books read aloud to children. Data were analyzed using a multilevel, cross-classification, ordered logit model. Children showed no word-meaning derivation 40% of the time, indicating a need for instruction.…

This article explores the role of text cohesion in the comprehension and production of text. While most discourse models have considered the roles of the text features and the reader, the crucial role of writers' epistemic stance has not been widely considered. The thesis explored here is that levels of cohesion emerge in text based on the…

Reading academic hypertext documents in college brings a new level of complexity that changes the definition of college reading and literacy. Knowing how to read these unpredictable, nonlinear texts requires familiarity and practice. The author describes the nature and usefulness of hypertext, reviews the challenges of reading hypertext, and…

Recent research on negation has demonstrated that while readers are aware that this text construction is difficult, they seem to be able to do little to improve their comprehension. The present research evaluated whether a change in typeface could improve comprehension and metacomprehension of negation. Results indicated that while readers were…

This article presents 34 characteristics of texts and tasks ("text features") that can make continuous (prose), noncontinuous (document), and quantitative texts easier or more difficult for adolescents and adults to comprehend and use. The text features were identified by examining the assessment tasks and associated texts in the national…

Adults are able to access semantic and syntactic information rapidly as they hear or read in real-time in order to interpret sentences. Young children, on the other hand, tend to rely on syntactically-based parsing routines, adopting the first noun as the agent of a sentence regardless of plausibility, at least during oral comprehension. Little is…

Shakespeare, who worked actively with words through punning, playing, and inventing, serves as the model for students to experience a deepening knowledge of vocabulary and love of words. Through instructional activities aimed at increasing word play, word exposure, and word consciousness, students gain the verbal capacity needed to understand…

In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated whether and how a comma influences the reading of Chinese sentences comprised of different types of syntactic constituent such as word, phrase and clause. Participants read Chinese sentences that did or did not insert a comma at the end of a syntactic constituent. The results showed that the fixation…

Summarizing text is one of the most effective comprehension strategies (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) and an effective way to learn from information text (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991; Pressley & Woloshyn, 1995). In addition, much research supports the explicit instruction of such strategies as…

Conversation is a strategy that helps students build reading skills and improve reading comprehension. It is not widely used in the primary grades due to limited time and perceived effort by the teacher. This study describes the implementation of connection prompts with second-grade students in book clubs. These prompts were cues implemented by…

The debate over the extent to which individual letters are perceived by proficient readers continues to play a dominant role in the ongoing "reading wars." One view holds that virtually all letters are processed, the other view that only some letters are perceived, supplemented by context and background knowledge. There is little research,…