This qualitative study analyzed preservice teachers' literacy memories. Each literate person has a history of becoming literate. As university students who plan to be future teachers think about their own literate histories, they begin to construct their own beliefs about learning to read and the teaching of reading and writing. These beliefs may…

Content-based reading texts play a vital role in the acquisition of knowledge and information in various fields of studies. Reading these texts at higher institution demands a great deal of effort from the students who are learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). These students who are generally school leavers, whose level or reading…

Decontextualization, referring to the abstraction of a written text from all of its contexts, is a flawed concept. Rather than viewing writing as an isolated abstraction, a text's involvement with the human world should be acknowledged. Two major questions arise when dealing with the concept of decontextualization: (1) Can written discourse be…

Any model of reading must take into account the role of the language system in reading. Readers' subjectivities and the reading position taken up in a text can be explicated by demonstrating how texts function in context and how readers function in social situations to construct possible meanings. Components of this model include text and context…

Discusses the complexities of teaching and learning multiple literacies at the middle and high school levels, examining the roles of and interactions between learners, texts, and contexts. The paper presents data from three case studies of secondary and adolescent learners' literacies in and out of school and in a variety of content areas. (SM)

Examined six aspects of vocabulary instruction given to fourth and sixth graders prior to reading in two basal reading series. Found that words targeted for instruction were already known; instruction in the two series differed markedly; much of the instruction was not sufficient to improve comprehension; and instruction was not necessarily suited…