Research demonstrates that intrinsic motivation "drives students' amount of reading" and that students who read for pleasure, to explore topics they care about, and for interest "read a lot and achieve greatly" (Guthrie 2). As teachers incline their pedagogy to student interests, ownership, self- efficacy, social interaction,…

Although much research on English for specific purposes (ESP) has been conducted, little focus has been placed on investigating the mechanisms involved in ESP readers' comprehension process. This case study explored the reading process that characterizes a competent ESP reader's comprehension. A juris doctor student attending a major university in…

Reading comprehension is multidimensional and complex. The persistent challenges children, adolescents, and even adults face with reading comprehension call for concerted efforts to develop assessments that help identify sources of difficulties and to design instructional approaches to prevent or ameliorate these difficulties. Doing so requires…

Readers typically experience processing difficulty when they encounter a word that is anomalous within the local context, such as "The mouse picked up the "dynamite...". The research reported here demonstrates that by placing a sentence in a fictional scenario that is already well known to the reader (e.g., a "Tom and Jerry" cartoon, as a context…

The democratic aim of American education is to provide "all" students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to become informed, effective, and responsible citizens. Like civic education itself, literacy education can be embraced by all teachers across all disciplines. There are strategies that all teachers can use to help address…

The democratic aim of American education is to provide "all" students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to become informed, effective, and responsible citizens. Like civic education itself, literacy education can be embraced by all teachers across all disciplines. There are strategies that all teachers can use to help address…

Two studies using the same texts and procedures but different experimental designs (1) evaluated an instrument designed to identify children who overrely on their prior knowledge in the interpretation of written text, and (2) investigated how degree of congruency of information interacts with degree of explicitness and level of staging to affect…

A study examined primary grade children's comprehension processes while reading a particular story in which specific areas likely to pose reading difficulty had been identified. Based on the children's readings and on their answers to questions concerning the text, five problem areas were identified: (1) poor decoding or word attack skills (2)…

Studied effects of expert knowledge and metacognitive knowledge on strategy acquisition. Boys who were poor readers and baseball experts were trained in reading strategy using baseball or nonbaseball stories. Found that boys trained using baseball stories demonstrated greater strategy use; boys with higher metacognition demonstrated better…

The first of a series providing reviews, syntheses (empirical and rhetorical), and reports of reading research, the chapters in this volume treat the question, "What does a child have to know (or be able to do) in order to learn to read?" The book begins with an in-depth logical analysis in historical perspective of the concept of reading…

Presents a framework for conceptualizing development of individual differences in reading ability that emphasizes the effects of reading on cognitive development and on "bootstrapping" relationships involving reading. Uses the framework to explicate some persisting problems in the literature on reading disability and to conceptualize…