Students face challenging texts in higher education, whether they are discipline-specific journal articles or great works of literature. Building on research in content area reading and disciplinary literacy, this case study explores the various stances undergraduate honors students take when coping with challenging texts while enrolled in a…

This case study examines how Ashley, a ninth-grade student, uses and applies metacognitive strategies for comprehension as she reads three different texts: a literary narrative, a history text, and a newspaper article. Interviews and think-aloud protocols were administered to investigate how the student thought about and enacted a variety of…

Graphic novels in the K-12 classroom are most often used to motivate marginalized readers because of the lower text load and assumption of easy reading. This assumption has thus far been unexplored by reading research. This qualitative multiple-case study utilized think-aloud protocols in a new attention-mapping activity to better understand how…

Due to the dominance of behaviorism, applied linguistics, and cognitive psychology since 1960s, many research studies in reading focused on the accuracy and speed required for successful comprehension. There exists a research gap in understanding the individual differences among readers when reading the same text. This study aimed at investigating…

Examines miscue analysis as a valuable tool for documenting what students already do well, so that instruction can build on areas of strength. (RAE)

Why do adolescents happily read some texts but fiercely resist reading others? Why do some teens read widely while others almost never read? This book shows how to find answer these questions--and more--by observing adolescents complex relationships with reading and letting them explain why they resist or engage with text. Author Anne Reeves…

A pilot case study addressed how a reader engages aesthetically with text. The main thrust theoretically is from the notion that "there are possible worlds other than the one we inhabit." Four subjects were chosen out of a total of 63 subjects in grades four through six in an elementary school in Western Canada. Out of the four subjects,…

Efferent teaching asks the student to read for a predetermined answer, focusing on another person's ideas of the text's meaning. Aesthetic teaching allows for literature to be read and experienced as art through the reader's personal transaction with the text which focuses on one's own interest to create and understand the meaning. This paper…

Examines two readers' images of literary characters as a basis for studying text meaning construction. Finds greater variation than commonality between the text and readers, as well as between the readers. Suggests using dialogue and rereadings in instruction to aid in developing and monitoring text understanding. (SR)

This study investigated the effects of linguistic simplification and content schemata on reading comprehension and recall. The participants, 240 Iranian male students of English as a foreign language (EFL), were divided into 4 homogeneous groups, each consisting of 60 participants (30 with high proficiency and 30 with low proficiency). To elicit…

Two theoretical perspectives are woven together to frame an approach to classroom reading instruction. Viewing reading instruction from a literary perspective and a psychological perspective has the potential to help students understand the distinctions between different text types and the various purposes for reading--information, enjoyment, and…

Paints a portrait of a students' varied experiences with literature, and explains how the teacher brings the reading process to a conscious level with students and parents to help them appreciate readers' strengths. Intertwines several case studies of students and their awareness (or lack of awareness) of their own reading strategies. (RS)

A study analyzed think-aloud protocols to investigate and describe what readers who are developing proficiency do as they read. Subjects, three sixth-grade middle-school boys (with grade point averages of 3.0-3.5 on a 4-point scale) from a small West Virginia suburb, read aloud 16 text sections (from one to four sentences in length), thought aloud…

In the 1970s and 1980s the white Australian author Patricia Wrightson's cross-cultural fantasies concerning the conflict of White characters with Aboriginal folk spirits struck a chord with many adolescent and adult readers who judged these novels to be outstandingly successful. A classroom-based study examined the responses of a class of seventh…

While young children's problem-solving models are not as elaborate as those of older students, they share an important belief, namely, that writing and reading are fundamentally purposeful acts of communication. Focusing on the interpretation of process, in particular on writing and reading as forms of problem-solving that are shaped by…