Explores the notion that genres not only help define and organize kinds of texts, they also help define and organize kinds of social actions. Investigates the role genre plays in the constitution of the contexts of texts, including the identities of those who write them and those who are represented within them. (NH)

The present study examined the unique contributions of readers' goal and text structure on comprehension. In Experiment 1, participants read procedural and descriptive passages to perform the procedures, summarize the passages, or to answer questions. The perform goal showed highest comprehension, with no difference due to text type. In Experiment…

Considering the difficulties in understanding the global meaning of texts, this paper intends to give some suggestions on how to help students reach a deeper understanding of texts in intensive reading classroom within the framework of schema theory. The purpose of this paper is expressed in three ways. The first is to give a brief overview of…

The present study examines how changes in the amount of on-screen text will influence student learning from a multimedia instructional unit on basic concepts of coordinate geometry. The relative effectiveness of two different versions (short-text and whole-text) of the instructional unit was examined for students who differed in terms of their…

Writers carefully include critical information in the opening lines of their chapters, but students often gloss over these beginning sentences, missing information that could help them better comprehend the text. To address this concern, the authors created a strategy that prompts students to examine the opening lines of chapters, helping readers…

Eight experiments evaluated a core assumption of several theories of text processing, the shared resource assumption, which states that component text processes share limited processing resources. Short texts each contained two critical sentences that together warranted a causal inference. The syntactic structure of the second sentence was either…

This study examined the influences of reading decoding skills and world knowledge on third graders' comprehension of narrative and expository texts. Children read a narrative text and an expository text. Comprehension of each text was assessed with a free recall prompt, three cued recall prompts, and 12 multiple-choice questions. Tests from the…

The aim of this study was to go further than considering only cognitive factors to extend the understanding of the complex, dynamic underlying knowledge revision processes. Fifth graders were assigned to 2 reading conditions. Participants in 1 condition read a refutational text about light, whereas participants in the other read a traditional…

A study examined the ways in which children recall structured text. Subjects, eighty-eight 12- to 13-year-old children, studied a short passage for five minutes which was printed in either a "chunked" format (where phrases are segmented or presented on separate lines) or a "traditional" one. The children were then asked to…

This paper presents some aspects of polyphonic theory, which contests the idea of the unique speaking subject and claims that several voices can be manifest in one utterance. The theory is related to the analysis of a coherent text consisting of several utterances. The notions of enunciator, speaker, enunciation, and utterance are defined in…

The use of readability formulas is spreading into the courts and legislatures as one objective measure to protect the basic rights of citizens. Court cases and legislation involving the readability of Federal Government forms and correspondence, materials concerning criminal rights, consumer product labeling, ballot measures, and warranties and…

One of the central problems in the study of fictional prose is that of distinguishing between mere linguistic regularity, which in itself is of no interest to literary studies, and regularity which is significant for the text in which it is found. General criteria for determining whether any particular instance of linguistic prominence is likely…

Describes how letter writing, especially business letters, was influenced by Greek and Roman oral rhetoricians. Discusses three precepts of oral rhetoric--inventio, dispositio, and style--and notes that the classical theories' reflection in written communication can be seen in selected Italian, German, and English epistolographic works. (MM)

No one has ever been able to look into the language space, nor has anyone been able to measure the phenomenon of consciousness without the interference of an observer. This article changes the situation, showing that from now on it is possible to produce measures of consciousness without the presence of classical observation devices. The…

This paper is a direct continuation of the experimental evaluation of the basic space-hypothesis explored in Real Time Imaging of the Rotation Mechanism Producing Interview-based Language Spaces. This project has required that different pars, the spaces of the A- and O-domains, be related and contrasted. In this paper the focus is on the…