This article is based on the hypothesis that Reading Recovery teachers sometimes mistakenly reduce or withdraw their support once children have developed strategic processing capabilities and gained higher levels of text reading. It discusses structural characteristics of higher level texts and considers several types of processing demands…

Examines advantages and disadvantages of using textbooks as the basis for curriculum and instruction, discussing textbooks as the predominant instructional medium. The article describes attributes of good textbooks and text structures, identifies strategies for improving readers' text comprehension, and notes teachers' role as facilitators in…

A study investigated how a knowledge or lack of knowledge of basic text structures, such as comparison and contrast and cause and effect, contributes to the reading process in remedial adolescent readers. By observing a group of graduate students and through the close study of a few adolescent case studies, a researcher attempted to determine if…

A qualitative study examined the ways in which middle school and high school students create meanings when they are reading literary and non-literary texts. Subjects, 18 seventh-grade and 18 eleventh-grade students attending schools in an inner city or a suburban school district and judged by their teachers to be either above, at, or below average…

Investigates the role of signaling (structural cues that announce or emphasize content or reveal content relationships) in helping good readers comprehend expository text. Finds that signals do improve a reader's comprehension, particularly comprehension two weeks after the reading of a passage and comprehension of superordinate and superordinate…

Reports a study, using sixth graders' introspective self-reports, to determine the context in which students use knowledge about narrative text structure, how they use this knowledge, and why they do not always employ this knowledge. (RAE)

Explores the nature of the picture story book event from a semiotic perspective. Describes a classroom event in which a picture story book was constructed during teacher-student-text interaction in a second grade classroom using involving oral reading and discussion, interpretations of the main character's traits, letters to the author, and…

Examines the role of the teacher in enhancing students' reading comprehension. Finds that the teacher is a more significant factor in the comprehension of lengthy natural texts than is the ease of the text itself. (MG)

Reading is construed as operating within the dynamics of the relationship of reader, text, context, and language system. Context is understood as the cultural and situational environment of the text, itself a semantic unit that is an instance of the language system. A related variable for reading is the awareness of the reader of the language…

Reading and understanding a text presents a variety of processing problems for L2 learners. The organizational pattern of a text has been considered by some researchers to have an important influence in this process. This article describes an experimental study of a group of Hong Kong schoolchildren and presents evidence that learners reading in…

A study investigated the role of phonemic (sound-based) information during silent reading to determine whether the visual tongue-twister effect occurs only when readers make judgments of sentence acceptability or whether the visual tongue-twister effect is due to the way sentences are represented in memory. Data were collected from 45 university…

Drawing on stories from classrooms, examples of student writing, and illustrations, this book explains in practical terms the theoretical underpinnings of how elementary school students learn to write from their reading. Beginning with the concepts that underlie how writing teachers teach students to write by studying other writers, it goes on to…

Two experiments investigated the role of text coherence in junior high school students' comprehension of science texts. Found that text coherence improved readers' comprehension, but also that giving readers with sufficient background knowledge an incoherent text that forced them to infer unstated relations engaged them in compensatory processing,…

Uses a cognitive processing perspective to revise fifth grade social studies texts, to describe those revisions, and to demonstrate their effects empirically. Finds that students reading the revised text recalled more material and answered more questions correctly than did those reading the original text. Concludes that a text-processing approach…

Learning using primary literature may be a way of developing a capacity for scientific ways of thinking among students. Since reading research articles is a difficult task for novices, we examined the possible benefits of learning using primary literature versus secondary literature, particularly with respect to their influence on the creation and…