Outlines some of the major principles of media education as it is practiced throughout the world; shows how current practice has evolved out of earlier, less satisfactory programs; and offers suggestions for future growth. Topics addressed include the manipulative nature of the media, popular culture, semantics, theories of ideology, the role of…

A meta-analysis of 21 instructional treatments aimed at enhancing the skill of deliberately deriving word meaning from context during reading shows a medium effect size of 0.43 standard deviation units. Exploratory multilevel regression shows that clue instruction appears more effective than other instruction types or practice alone. (Author/SLD)

Summary Street is educational software based on latent semantic analysis (LSA), a computer method for representing the content of texts. The classroom trial described here demonstrates the power of LSA to support an educational goal by providing automatic feedback on the content of students' summaries. Summary Street provides this feedback in an…

Computer science provides with virtual laboratories, places where one can merge real experiments with the formalism of algorithms and mathematics and where, with the advent of multimedia, sounds and movies can also be added. In this paper we present a method, based on principles of formal ontology, allowing one to develop interactive educational…

A method of training pupils to read for total comprehension by an analytical approach is proposed. Specific techniques are suggested. (RM)

Literary artists manipulate language. If educators could develop in their students the same sense that language is manipulable, they could help them to better appreciate literature. Emily Dickinson's poem "I Like to See It Lap the Miles" could be approached by changing it on several levels--graphics, phonics, syntax, and semantics--and…

Proposes a methodology for teaching comprehension of a foreign language in both the reading and the listening domains. (Text is in French.) (TL)

The first part of this paper presents a set of principles that constitute a theory of lexical meaning. The second part considers the implications of the theory for the teaching of English vocabulary in foreign or second language classrooms. (CLK)

Content area teachers should be aware of the five levels of vocabulary with which their students must cope. The five levels include standard words at the least complex level, transitional terms that have different meanings in the content area than in standard usage, technical terms specific to the subject area, changeable terms (similar to…

Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech is presented in this paper and shown to be an effective vehicle for helping students discover the power of language and of literature. The paper first discusses the potentially destructive way English teachers sometimes tell students about "hidden meanings" in long and complex works…

Earlier training attempts to prevent drug abuse were predicated on a cognitive-behavior link. Increased information generally resulted in more positive attitudes toward drug use. An educational alternative which may intervene in drug taking behavior is Value-Sharing. Parents in a Value-Sharing course were administered a form of the Semantic…

If in reading a sentence a reader finds something unfamiliar in lexical meaning or grammatical structures, the meaning of the written material may be ambiguous to him. Sometimes the context will help to clarify the meaning of an unfamiliar element, but often it won't. Understanding what is read involves not only the process of reasoning, but also…

Some 26 abstracts of papers presented at the Conference are compiled in this report. Topics include papers by noted specialists on: (1) programed language instruction (2) Milivox, (3) individualized instruction, (4) Spanish phonetics, (5) linguistic analysis, (6) semantics, (7) the comparative in English, (8) inflectional and derivational…

Providing contextual cues leads to more effective learning than depth of semantic processing activity. However, the positive effects of contextual cues are reduced when the subject must search for the theme during the learning activity, as opposed to having it presented before the passage. (CP)