A study examined the role that an elaborate analogy can play when high school students learn a concept from a leading science textbook. The elaborate analogy had graphic and text components that integrated and mapped key features from the analogy (a factory) to the target concept (an animal cell). The target features were parts of the cell and, by…

This paper proposes that a metaphor of linguistic levels, similar to that used in general linguistic theory, be applied to the study of levels within an essay. The linguistic conception of levels in a piece of writing is not sentence-paragraph-essay (which might be characterized as a rhetorical division) but rather (or in addition to)…

A literature review traced a major theoretical shift in the understanding of how people read--from the passive reader who receives and decodes information to the strategic reader who actively chooses what, when, and how to read, reads interpretively, and interprets a text (such as a newspaper article) as an organized structure. The result is a…

A study explored the question of the development of recall for narrative and informative texts. Subjects, 60 5th- 8th-, and 11th-grade students from a rural area of Quebec, representing all levels of achievement, were presented with an informative text and a narrative text. Results indicated that: (1) the narrative text elicited a longer recall…

Intended to gain information about students who have difficulty organizing text when they write, a study probed students' ability to recognize and understand varying degrees of text organization while reading. Ninety ninth-grade students, divided equally into groups of good readers/good writers, good readers/poor writers, and poor readers/poor…

A study provided students with relevant background knowledge and tested the effects of this knowledge on two versions of a text. The two text versions were four original segments of text from a fifth-grade social studies textbook about the period leading to the American Revolution and their revised versions from an article in "Reading…

This study examined the influence of textual display in printed instruction on the attention, performance, and preference of 90 preservice teachers, and investigated differential effects of textual display for high and low ability learners. Textual display was operationally defined as the arrangement of specified elements on the printed page, and…

A study was conducted to determine whether there was any match between student perception of reading ease and the readability of three main line, first-year college composition texts (Daugherty; Kinneavy, McCleary, and Nakadate; Lauer, Montague, Lunsford, and Emig) as determined by five commonly used readability formulas. Two chapters (on…

To determine whether less able readers could use the strategies they had been taught, a study investigated the transfer effects of training in the use of graphic organizers and summary writing on readers' recognition of the compare/contrast text structure. Subjects, 70 freshmen at a western New York state college of liberal arts and sciences in a…

Graphic organizers (also referred to as structured overviews, mapping, webbing, or pyramiding) are visual aids which depict the relationships among concepts in a text and which reflect the organization of the text. Five patterns of graphic organizers--cause/effect, comparison/contrast, time/order, simple listing, and problem solving--reflect the…

Examines text structure of argumentative writing in English by Korean speakers as compared with native speakers'(NS) writing in Korean and NS writing in English. Interactive text analysis showed English essays had a clear structural pattern that the Korean essays lacked. Sample essays and questionnaires are included in Appendix. (Author/LMO)

Identifying the main points of a communication is fundamental to successful reading comprehension. Discussed are difficulties in defining main idea, text structure variables in determining important information, textual hierarchy and the theory of macrostructure, text features signalling important information, summary writing, learning-disabled…

Effective literacy programs involve a wide range of reading and writing activities, all of which are necessary and which support learning in different ways. An essential part of the language arts curriculum involves direct instruction in reading. Many teachers are beginning to teach reading in small groups, a process called "guided…

Encouraging teachers to utilize procedures and techniques that help their students become active, willing lifelong readers, this handbook has been compiled to serve as a guide for integrating the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment's (PSSA) definition of reading as a dynamic, interactive process into classroom practice. The handbook…

This paper begins by providing an overview of three types of textbook research methods: asking teachers, parents, or students about the different aspects of textbook quality; textbook analysis, i.e. counting some characteristics of a textbook using strictly fixed rules; and the experimental evaluation of textbooks, usually carried out in schools.…