Elementary school students learn in school to stay within the boundaries of a single text, but students should be encouraged to read beyond a single text. A "single-passage paradigm" pervades school-based reading instruction, research, and assessment. Four scaffolding issues can promote a variety of stimulating approaches for reading…

Exploring the responses of a variety of readers from three-year-old Dominic sharing a picture book with his father to adults reading a poem by Ted Hughes, this book examines the ways in which various readers respond to different texts. The aim of the book is to develop an awareness of the issues involved in readers' responses for primary teachers.…

Text has traditionally been the mode used to convey information in educational settings, including workplace training. Unfortunately, printed materials have little to offer persons with reading difficulties. Text may be made easier to understand by using predictable structure, shorter sentences, and less demanding vocabulary; however, such…

A study compared six midwestern United States campus newspapers with their respective general circulation newspapers. A content analysis of these publications was designed to determine whether local news stories in daily student newspapers are as readable, interesting, and thorough as those found in general circulation daily newspapers. The daily…

The concept of authenticity in foreign language pedagogy is discussed with particular reference to the methodology of instructing through the medium of authentic texts. It is suggested that the use of authentic texts in a classroom setting actually deauthenticates those elements that made the texts originally authentic; i.e., placing them in a…

A review was conducted of the research related to the ability of elementary school children to carry out search tasks with informational text. The review was organized within a framework of components of the search process: goal formation, text selection, information extraction and integration, and evaluation. The research reviewed suggests that…

Advising student writers to think constantly about their readers, this book provides thorough instruction in the technical writing process, organizing most chapters around easy-to-understand guidelines, and providing numerous annotated examples of writing done at work. New to the second edition of the book are chapters on persuasion, using the…

A study explored the connection between reading and writing by examining the writing produced by three young readers of action comic books. The subjects were in grades four and five in a British Columbia (Canada) school and were identified by a survey as being avid comic book readers. During three writing sessions, they were asked to produce…

This article presents methods and results from diachronic studies of articles carried out within the project "LSP Texts in the 20th Century," a study of genre-bound linguistic change and variation in science and popular science in the fields of economics, medicine, and technology. The interrelationship between text and context is central for the…

During the past century, most research addressing the legibility of text in print has used adult subjects. The study reported in this paper investigated differences in reading rate and comprehension scores of eighth grade students reading from paper copy or computer screen. Three hundred eighth grade students in computer literacy classes were…

To investigate the relationship between reading ability and the detection and repair of text-based (internal) inconsistencies, a study examined 100 college students enrolled in an introductory educational psychology course at a large state university. Based on their performance on the comprehension portion of the Nelson-Denny Reading Test,…

Two variables that designers should consider when developing computer-based instruction (CBI) text screens are text density, which manipulates the context of the information presented, and screen density, which is a measurement of the amount of information presented at one time on the screen. A study on text density was designed to identify…

This study examined whether reference questions based on the text-linguistic structure of scientific literature would enable users to express their information needs effectively. Subjects with similar levels of topic familiarity completed online search forms that used open, bibliographic, or (text-linguistic) structural questions. Questions based…

Describes a technique using expository text structures and graphic organizers as the basis for taking notes from content area texts. This technique can be transferred to notetaking during lectures. (RS)

This paper addresses the role of prior knowledge in the comprehension of narrative and expository text, two major categories of discourse. The paper reviews some of the differences in the essence of prior knowledge required to comprehend each text type and then examines research on prior knowledge and conceptual change that deals with both text…