Investigates relations among students' interest in texts, self assessments, and comprehension performance. States that 31 college students read expository texts and--after providing an interest rating and a confidence rating in answering inferences generated from passages on domains--rated texts and completed true/false comprehension questions.…

Examines students' ability to understand definitions of novel verbs--in 2 experiments upper elementary students received definitions of pseudowords paired with sentences using those words and evaluated use as appropriate for definition given. Finds students' judgments about these sentences were not substantially different from chance, suggesting…

Examines three episodes of the children's educational television show "Reading Rainbow." Finds that the program reflects prevailing beliefs about literacy development--it provides viewers with many experiences with print through exposure to quality children's literature and through modeling the use and enjoyment of literacy; employs…

Suggests that the sense of ownership that children have over comic books accounts for the vibrant debate, discussion, and critique of them. Examines whether insights from Archie comics may help teachers reclaim literacy as a meaning-making practice. Concludes that teachers remain ambivalent about the place of comic books within educational…

Considers the resistance of preservice teachers to address sociopolitical dimensions within the context of children's literature. Presents an account of an incident, a description of the research that the author conducted, theoretical explanations, strategies which she has utilized for countering the resistance, and reasons why research such as…

Suggests that (1) readers store a substantial amount of text-sequencing information; (2) memory for text-sequencing information is strongly related to comprehension; (3) memory for place on the page is very weak; and (4) memory for place-on-the-page and text-sequencing information appear to be distinct. Indicates that text-sequence information is…

Explores how the native speakers of English and nonnative speakers of English in adult basic education classes present different reading behaviors. Suggests that adult basic education teachers should not only be aware of how much decoding students know but also to what extent they actually use that knowledge when reading. (SG)

Describes an approach to assisting seventh-grade students' comprehension of individual texts with a Scaffolded Reading Experience (SRE). Includes an outline of the scaffolded reading experience. Describes a classroom study of the effect of using SREs. Finds SREs can increase students' comprehension of short stories. (SG)

Examines the nature of the relations between home literacy environment (HLE) and oral language, letter knowledge, phonological sensitivity, and word decoding during a one-year interval in preschool children. Finds that each of the HLE conceptualizations was consistently related to the outcomes studies, but the magnitude of the relations varied…

Suggests that if adolescents are going to get hooked on poetry and read and write more than an occasional sample, they need to have teachers share with them poetry they will enjoy. Considers a study by Karen Kutiper of middle school student poetry preference. Presents conclusions from this study along with a list of the 25 most popular poems. (SG)

Examines the etiology of high reading ability in twin pairs. Suggests that reading ability and its cognitive correlates are on a continuous distribution, with both extremes of the distribution being similarly heritable. Supports the hypothesis that the same cognitive processes that are associated with dyslexia are important for the development of…

Discusses an experiment that links phonological awareness and reading performance in children with Down syndrome. Examines the results within the framework of the author's metalinguistic development theory in which alphabet reading is a pacemaker for the development of explicit phonological awareness. (PM)

Examines the effects of reading comprehension ability and the presence of explicit or implicit causal relationships upon recall of propositional content and comprehension of interpropositional relationships. Finds that, in the late elementary grades, better readers begin to develop a strategy for the processing of written text which involves…

Tests the point of convergence of linguistic information from auditory and visual channels. Compares reaction times for auditory and visual stimuli consisting of sentences, syntactic nonsense strings, random words, and nonwords. Finds that listening and reading processing converge at the word level and that words processed aurally and visually…

Examines how vocabulary knowledge, the familiarity of words, and analytical reasoning affect sixth-grade students' ability to learn word meanings from passages in basal reading textbooks. Finds that general and passage-specific vocabulary knowledge are important variables that influence learning from context. Finds that analytical reasoning was…