As an instructional tool, graphic organizers (GOs) have been highly recommended and used in contemporary classrooms. Over the past decade, a number of concerns have been raised about claims for the effectiveness of GOs. These concerns involve the inconsistent research results on student improvements, the limitation in generalizability from…

The commentary argues for an understanding of how texts are put together that accounts for multimodality and draws on children's ways of being and doing in the home, their "habitus". It focuses on identities as socially situated. It argues that it is important to trace the process of sedimenting identities during text production. This offers a way…

Research shows that students who have a good understanding of narrative text structure have fewer problems comprehending stories. Research also suggests that many students require explicit instruction in how to comprehend this text type. While some children are able to figure out the more elaborate structure of narrative text on their own (i.e.,…

A reduced relative-main clause ambiguity occurs in sentences that begin with reduced relative clauses, as in "The hangman executed by the government was convicted of treason." This ambiguity has often been the focus of research designed to investigate the processes by which syntactic structures are built during sentence comprehension.…

Finds that detection of flaws in a list provides an opportunity to widen perspective on list content, and further opportunity exists when list headings have two meanings. Argues that the list may be represented better by a two-dimensional array. Considers the term "function" used in a list heading, splitting it into its most common…

School success in the 21st century requires proficiency with expository discourse--the use and understanding of informative language in spoken and written modalities. This occurs, for example, when high school students read their textbooks and listen to their teachers' lectures, and later are asked to demonstrate their knowledge of this complex…

The present study relates to a research line in didactics of science that focuses on the function that sign systems or semiotic modes have in communicative interactions in science classrooms. The study was conducted by 20 secondary and university science teachers who belong to the same research group LIEC ("Language and Science…

The aim of the study was to determine whether the animation of a linear process, requiring explanatory text, can assist students to form a better understanding of the text. Tertiary students (N = 61) participated in a pre-test, post-test experimental study during which they were exposed to 4 treatment variables: text (T), video and text (VT),…

Direct quotation can be a source of meaning in storybook texts for beginning readers. The author of this article sketches the linguistic complexity of direct quotation and offers instructional strategies. Three aspects of direct quotation are examined: the cluster of print features and syntactic characteristics that direct quotation involves, the…

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…

Provides information and discussion of the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. Explains what makes a good nonfiction book for children and discusses several books that have been honored in the first two years of the award. (MG)

Offers some thoughts on the structure of the choices presented in the hypertext read-only file called "WOE" (included on a disk with this journal). (SR)