Describes the intermediate forms of children's informational and story composition across the elementary grades. Finds that even the youngest children differentiated between the genres with over half of all kindergartners and first graders producing texts classified at some level of organizational complexity above labels and statement, and by…

Examines how one organizational genre, the work order, functioned to orient different groups so that work could be accomplished, and could be credited within the normal hierarchy of the organization. Implications emphasize the political aspect of genre as a form of social action. Concludes the work orders as a genre both triggered and concealed…

Describes the idea of creating a glove for each of the comprehension strategies for use with different text structures. Notes that the gloves serve as a multisensory approach by providing visual clues through icons on each finger and the palm. Discusses three different gloves: the prereading glove, the narrative text structure glove, and the…

This qualitative study investigated written discourse in the form of personal letters written by ten people with aphasia following stroke and ten people with cognitive-language disorder as a consequence of traumatic brain injury, and compared their performance with 15 non brain-damaged writers. Personal letters perform the dual function of…

This article discusses methods for evaluating students' content-area literacy skills. Four specific factors that affect content-area literacy are described: vocabulary knowledge, topic knowledge, text structure knowledge, and textbook readability, along with methods of evaluating each of the factors. Most of these methods have not yet been…

A study examined the ability of 204 students in nine Illinois high schools to process and recall information contained in four newspaper elements: story texts, graphics, index boxes and pullout quotes. Students were randomly assigned to read the front page of one of 20 newspapers and answer questions based on information in the stories. Students…

This compilation explains the Strategic Reading Project (SRP), a long-term staff development project for schools committed to improving their students' ability to read strategically. Noting that the SRP has been designed for elementary schools, the compilation points out that the project is adaptable to high schools. The Project Team Notebook in…

Integrating metacognitive skills into classroom instruction can help students to develop into active, independent readers and learners. B. Armbruster, in a summary of research on metacognition, examined reading to learn from a metacognitive perspective as it related to four variables: texts, tasks, strategies, and learner characteristics.…

A writing teacher who teachers first-year college writing proposes a "different" approach to the teaching of academic discourse. It is an approach that includes the production of academic discourse and rhetorical analysis yet enables students to examine and often resolve their resistance against academic discourse. Through a critical…

This paper addresses the microsemantic and macrothematic analyses of science and popular science texts from the fields of economics, medicine, and technology used in the "LSP [Languages for Specific Purposes] Texts in the 20th Century" project. Results show that the frequency of the relations is different within various parts of the…

A current trend in composition consider writing a social act where texts are produced because of and in response to social contexts. Classroom practices are just beginning to change and acknowledge the power that discourse communities assert on writers. Composition teachers must also acknowledge the importance of community-governed reading…

Focusing on the process of reading comprehension, this book contains chapters on some central topics relevant to understanding the processes associated with comprehending text. The articles and their authors are as follows: (1) "Comprehension Processes: Introduction" (K. Rayner); (2) "The Role of Meaning in Word Recognition"…

This study hypothesized that altering a news story to conform to a more familiar structure might increase comprehension and recall. Subjects, 104 undergraduate students, completed a Media Use Survey, a questionnaire for collecting demographic information, the WIRE test, a strength of text schema measure, and a comprehension questionnaire. Students…

A study investigated the relation of text structure to information retained by readers. The premise investigated was that memory for the central facts of a passage will be enhanced by the presence of related information as theorized in the encoding elaboration model (developed by Anderson and Reder in 1979). This model states that comprehension…

Experimental subjects wrote abstracts of an article using a simplified version of the TEXTNET abstracting assistance software; subjects were presented with either keywords or phrases extracted automatically. Results showed considerable variation among subjects, but 37% found the keywords or phrases "quite" or "very" useful in…