Presents a technique for dividing text into field-coherent passages based upon extracting field-associated words or phrases from the text by determining how topics grow, shrink and shift from sentence to sentence. Proposes measures of topic continuity and transition and suggests how those may be used to find the passage boundaries. (Author/LRW)

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…

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…

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…

This paper underscores the effect of text cohesion on EFL reading comprehension. 160 EFL (n = 80) and non-EFL (n = 80) university students took two versions of a cloze test based on a passage of 750 words length one developed with every nth word deletion and the other with cohesive word deletion. The results of analyses of variance indicated that…

Two scientific ideas have been discerned in 20th century thinking: the structuralism common in Europe and the functionalism apparent in the United States. This paper presents two experiments in text analysis. One discusses the behaviorist writing style of Ernest Hemingway. It hypothesizes that since he is a behaviorist in practice, he should be a…

This article advances the bio-kinetic hypothesis that the complexity and nonlinear dynamics of language can be approached on the basis of the Agent-action-Objective (AaO) paradigm. It is shown that the derived AaO units rotate and that AaO-governed rotations include functions that can be imagined in real time, provided that a dot marking the state…

Discussion of page design for desktop publishing focuses on the importance of functional issues as opposed to aesthetic issues, and criticizes a previous article that stressed aesthetic issues. Topics discussed include balance, consistency in text structure, and how differences in layout affect the clarity of "The Declaration of…

Focuses on how typography and color complement and differ from each other in signaling an underlying content structure; the synergism between typography, color, and page layout (use of white space) that aids audience understanding and use; and the characteristics of typography and of color that are most important in these contexts. (SR)

Offers guidelines to help novice hypertext designers construct interfaces that are usable. Discusses windows versus frames, which interaction style to use, how to display text and buttons effectively, and how to use color and tables, diagrams, and animation effectively. (SR)

States that the transition from book to screen requires analytical comparison, and that the structure of the book cannot be translated to the screen without consideration of new spatial practices afforded by hypermedia "architexture." Discusses similarities between digital and printed documents and the implications for the digital…

Traces the career of Jack Stenner. Stenner made the empirical discovery that observable readability could be entirely predicted from word familiarity and sentence length, and applied this "Lexile Framework"(R) to books and readers. Discusses the use of the Lexile Framework as a way to target specific readers. (SLD)