Background: Children in India are among the lowest performing students on international reading comprehension and writing assessments. Oral language instruction may improve these literacy outcomes. Aim: This pilot study investigated whether a multi-tiered system of language support (MTSLS) improved oral narrative language comprehension, reading…

Language comprehension is remarkable in that we adapt easily to different forms of language use, from adapting to speakers' dialects, meanings of new slang words, and fictional worlds described in novels. While there is growing evidence comprehenders adapt their expectations for text during reading, the nature of these adaptation mechanisms…

Reading and telling stories to children improves their narrative skills, which is well-documented for monolinguals, but not for bilinguals. We investigated whether bilingual narratives improve when the child is provided with a model story. We studied the narratives of Polish-English bilingual children (n = 75, mean age 5;7 years; months) raised in…

Background and aims: The purpose of the current exploratory study was to describe the inferential narrative comprehension skills of young school-age children on the autism spectrum who, as a group, are at high risk of significant and persistent reading comprehension difficulties. Our aim was to investigate whether the anticipated difficulties in…

Comprehensibility ratings and sentence-by-sentence reading times of three-sentence narratives (triples) were studied as a function of the coherence of a triple. In both experiments, reading times did not differ for first sentences, but were longer for third sentences of unrelated than for related triples. (Author/RM)

Presents some of the general goals in story grammar research and examines its major issues. Then describes a study in which the effects of text content and order on narrative recall were investigated in intermediate and advanced readers of English as a foreign language. (SED)

Discussion of ways in which second-language learners' processing of and interaction with narrative and expository texts affects their performance on cloze tests suggests that researchers and teachers interpreting these tests should not assume that such tests only assess language ability. (CB)

Concludes that children could attend to texts selectively when reading or listening to expository prose, and when reading, but not in listening to narrative prose. (FL)

An addition to the "wholeness of language" debate, this document is divided into two sections. The first reviews theories regarding the reading writing relationship, suggesting that an awareness of the interdependencies and commonalities among various forms of communication may provide insights leading to students learning to read like…

Examines whether strategy training orienting second language (L2) students' attention toward referential processes improves their comprehension of Japanese narrative. Findings revealed that experimental students comprehended the story at the macro level significantly better than control students, suggesting that the strategy training is beneficial…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 32 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) textual relations within the written and spoken modes; (2) the construction of stance in conflict narrative; (3) the relational base theory of phrase…