Teachers can use comics for reading instruction by capitalizing on their colorful graphic representation. Technology and reading are wed during the use of the Internet, and readers must rely on their visual literacy skills--a group of vision competencies people can hone for comprehension. This article reports on strategies for developing visual…

A highly practical resource for the classroom, this book offers clear, research-based recommendations for helping students at all grade levels understand and learn from what they read. Explaining the skills and strategies that good readers use to comprehend text, the authors show how to support struggling students in developing these skills. They…

Students with learning disabilities (LD) often experience difficulties in writing fluently and using a diversity of words. To help these students, specific and effective writing strategies must be incorporated into instruction and demonstrated to them through modeling. This study examined the effectiveness of using a story map and story map…

Quilts have become a part of American Indian culture, and they are mentioned and even highlighted in certain works of contemporary Native American literature. Certain questions can be posed in regard to the inclusion of quilt references in contemporary American Indian novels. Do the quilts and the making of quilts have some type of metaphorical…

Reader, writers, and teachers of expository prose should pay closer attention to the question and answer (Q&A) format's theoretical and practical implications. The Q&A format contributes to the seemingly endless succession of questions and answers and is part of that flight from one signifier to another characteristic of postmodern…

Textual meaning is not autonomous--not only do the meanings of texts change as contexts change but also the textual or sentence meanings change as cultural conventions change. A series of preliminary studies have established that children into the early school years believe that the speaker's intentions, especially when the speaker's belief is…

This paper discusses self-reference in the text, in order to examine its rhetorical intentions, and the writing strategies it offers an author. Following a brief introduction, the first section deals with definitions, and classifies self-reference "markers." The second section discusses intentions and self-reference, while the third…

Expands on how a strategic reader uses text structure knowledge as an overarching strategy, a framework within which to incorporate other strategies to gain ideas from text. (MG)

Investigates the ability of 757 children aged 8, 11, 14, and 18 years to judge the importance of intraepisodic and interepisodic story statements on the basis of their causal properties. Children in all groups judged statements with many intraepisodic causal relations as being more important than statements with few such relations. (RJC)

Discusses two ways of organizing writing: "imitative" or "natural" order, which reflects either chronology or spatiality; and "imposed" order, in which topical materials have been restructured in a significant way. Argues that all rhetorical alternatives should be considered when teaching writing. (MM)

Explains how charting cause and effect in expository texts can increase students' knowledge of text structure. Provides a sample effect and cause chart. (MM)

Defines good expository text and reviews studies on two text features--structure and interestingness--that affect readers' comprehension. Discusses implications for further inquiry. (JAD)

Describes global strategies (such as choosing a consistent text paradigm) and local strategies (such as using sentence chains and creating causal networks) that are characteristic of coherent task instructions. (JAD)

Presents the list-structure data model for dealing with sets of objects, which has ordering as its fundamental principle. An extended notion of patterns and several operators of the algebra are presented. Design issues that influenced the development of the language are described. (Contains 30 references.) (KRN)

Outlines desirable qualities for graphic representation of sentence dependency structures in texts more than a few sentences in length. Several different display formats prototyped in the TEXNET experimental text structure management system are described, illustrated, and compared, and automatic structure manipulations are discussed. (36…