Textbooks are heavily used in secondary-level content area classes, but previous research has identified numerous challenges for students associated with reading and understanding these texts. While students can learn reading strategies that help them better understand text, it is unclear the extent to which textbooks are written to promote or…

Prompted by a moment in the classroom in which the DJ becomes integral for the writing instructor, this article looks at how the hip-hop DJ and hip-hop DJ/Producer become the intrinsic examples for first-year college writing students to think about how they conduct revision in their writing. After a review of two seminal hip-hop books and other…

Structured Literacy (SL) approaches are often recommended for students with dyslexia and other poor decoders (e.g., International Dyslexia Association, 2017). Examples of SL approaches include the Wilson Reading System (Wilson, 1988), Orton-Gillingham (Gillingham & Stillman, 2014), the Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (Lindamood &…

In this paper I analyze the role of hindsight in narrative configuration. Configuration means the grasping together of disparate elements into a coherent whole. I argue that hindsight, importantly, brings the temporal constraints on what we can know to the fore, but is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, hindsight is an indispensable tool both…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between text structure and two levels of reading comprehension, namely literal and inferential, in Iranian EFL learners. Studies have generally found that learners perform differently after they have read different text structures (Amiri et al. in "Proc Soc Behav Sci"…

Background: Improving children's oral language skills is an important focus of educational research and practice; however, relatively few interventions have demonstrated impacts on these skills. This work makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the effects of language-focused interventions in pre-kindergarten settings by examining…

Background: Improving children's oral language skills is an important focus of educational research and practice; however, relatively few interventions have demonstrated impacts on these skills. This work makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the effects of language-focused interventions in pre-kindergarten settings by examining…

This article describes the complex cognitive and linguistic challenges of summarizing expository text at vocabulary, syntactic, and rhetorical levels. It then outlines activities to help ABE/ESL learners develop corresponding skills.

The paper deals with the issue of computational psycholinguistic analysis (CPA) and its experimental application in basic psychological and pedagogical assessment. CPA is a new method which may potentially provide interesting, psychologically relevant information about the author of a particular text, regardless of the text's factual (semantic)…

This essay explores "content," a word and concept now often associated with writing in fields including marketing, journalism, publishing, and technical communication. I present a definition of content appropriate to writing studies and explore a range of issues and practices that the content metaphor can bring to our professional,…

Learning often involves integration of information from multiple texts. The aim of the current study was to determine whether relevant information from previously read texts is spontaneously activated during reading, allowing for integration between texts (experiment 1 and 2), and whether this process is related to the representation of the texts…

This study examined the thinking processes students engage in while constructing graphic representations of textbook content. Twenty-eight students who either used graphic representations in a routine manner during social studies instruction or learned to construct graphic representations based on the rhetorical patterns used to organize textbook…

While social studies educators suggest that social studies instruction can and should be taught both through literacy-integrated delivery as well as independently from other subjects, many elementary classroom teachers often find that school expectations or district mandates leave little instructional time for any subject that is not specifically…

The need for student engagement is ever present in the online classroom as engaged students are more likely to feel connected with course material, classmates, instructors, and their university (Drouin & Vartanian, 2010; Wilson & Gore, 2013). According to Tayebinik and Puteh (2013), engaged students often achieve higher final scores in the…

This study examines children's strategies when scanning a document to answer a specific question. More specifically, we wanted to know whether they make use of organizers (i.e., headings) when searching and whether strategic search is related to their knowledge of reading strategies. Twenty-six French fifth graders were asked to search single-page…