This study investigated the effects of different versions of Web-based instruction focused on text structure on fifth- and seventh-grade students' reading comprehension. Stratified random assignment was employed in a two-factor experiment embedded within a pretest and multiple posttests design (immediate and four-month delayed posttests). The two…

Seventy-seven new academics--59 at a large, public university in the UK and 18 at a medium-sized, private comprehensive university in the USA--were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main…

A study of 25 expert teachers and their shared reading lessons in grades 3-8 suggests that teachers focus their modeling during shared reading in four categories: comprehension, vocabulary, text structures, and text features. (Contains 1 figure.)

Code-switching research has focused on spontaneous conversation, and code-switching has often been seen as a consequence of bilinguals attending to and extending the "macro" status and functions of the two languages in society, attitudes towards these languages, and their cultural connotations, for instance, the "we-code" vs.…

Critical thinking skills are crucial for both academic and everyday life. This paper presents the author's Text Analysis Matrix (TAM), a model for developing skills for the critical examination of texts. The TAM guidelines involve finding and clarifying the main claims of a text, discovering and assessing arguments, uncovering the implications for…

This study was conducted to determine the relative efficacy of text-structure strategy instruction compared to traditional instruction on the reading comprehension of 40 postsecondary students with learning disabilities (LD). Participants were randomly assigned to either a text-structure strategy condition or a traditional instruction condition.…

The aim of this paper is to provide a brief critical analysis of the adult literacy curriculum as one element of the Skills for Life Strategy and to consider how it has been used to legitimise a dominant adult literacy policy based on economic and political rationales. The term critical has many meanings. Here it is used to explore how the adult…

Unlike the vocabulary used in language arts and social studies, knowledge of expository text (text written to inform) and the language of science are required for reading and writing in science (Carrier 2005). This vocabulary, along with expository text structures, often is not taught in middle and high school classrooms, thus hindering students,…

Discusses problems with marking free text, text that is either natural language or semigrammatical but unstructured, that prevent well-formed XML from marking text for readily available meaning. Proposes a solution to mark meaning in free text that is consistent with the intended simplicity of XML versus SGML. (Author/LRW)

The present paper aims at investigating the structure and the content of the written explanations produced by primary school pupils' aged 11-12) during teaching sequences focused on the didactic elaboration of obstacles regarding temperature and heat. At first, teaching sequences targeted at the pupils' destabilising, restructuring, and…

According to research in educational psychology, advance organizers lead to better learning and recall of information. In this research, the authors explored advance organizers from a business perspective, where larger documents are read under time pressure. Graphic and verbal advance organizers were manipulated into six versions of an advisory…

The purpose of this paper, drawing data from a large research base, was to investigate how and why Taiwanese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) male and female university students responded to feminist texts differently. These participants were taking an elective course titled Gender and Reading while this research was conducted. Weekly reading…

Comprehensive, authoritative, and designed for practical utility, this handbook presents evidence-based approaches for helping struggling readers and those at risk for literacy difficulties or delays. Leading experts explain how current research on all aspects of literacy translates into innovative classroom practices. Chapters include clear…

Studies leads and other top paragraphs in stories from the Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UPI), Scripps Howard News Service, and three major newspapers. Finds average lead sentence lengths range from 39 to 25 words. Suggests that journalists may be writing for themselves more than for readers. (RS)

Background: The Material Appropriate Processing (MAP) framework suggests that the influence of a text adjunct on the learning and transfer of textual information will be moderated by the overlap between type of processing induced by the adjunct and by the organisation of the text. The two types of processing are item specific processing and…