Choosing an acceptable textbook is not a simple task since it may be a key component in most language program. It serves as language input and language practice for learners. It also provides the premise for content lesson, the variety of language practice for learner, and serves as a supplement for teacher's instruction. Teaching and learning a…

In this article, the relationships between students' personal relationship to the concept of pressure and teaching conditions of this concept were investigated in terms of the Anthropological Theory of Didactics. To determine these complex relationships, first an institutional analysis was conducted, and in this same manner, the textbook has been…

This paper reports on the analysis of an instructional text on the basis of M. Bakhtin's (1986) notion of speech genres, which is used to theorize the different influences on the writing of an instructional text. Speech genres are used to reveal the multiple voices inherent in any text: the writer's, the reader's, and the text's. The…

This report describes a project which analyzed science and social studies textbooks to determine how well they accommodate the learning needs of mainstreamed hard-to-teach students. A textbook analysis tool was developed, and eight teacher-reviewers examined the instructional design of teachers' and students' editions of 12 leading elementary and…

This paper introduces an evaluation tool prepared to examine the quality of visuals in course-books. The tool is based on Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (i.e. Generative Theory) and its principles regarding the correct use of illustrations within text. The reason to generate the tool, the development process along with the…

Reports on a study to determine the effects of the presentation of questions inserted into texts for students in introductory biology. Results indicated that students reading the text with questions at the beginning of the paragraph scored significantly higher on achievement tests than the students reading without questions. (TW)

Four text passages varying along the dimensions of the number of propositions unifying one or more text paragraphs and text length were constructed. The text content pertained to nine concepts in the area of operant conditioning psychology. Fifty-eight university students were pretested and then blocked on prior text-related knowledge, and read…