Encourages teachers to evaluate the strategies used by their students in comprehension. Argues that this will provide information that will help in planning instruction. (FL)

Concludes that a cloze strategy, which induced students to integrate text information with prior knowledge, yielded superior gains in comprehension compared to treatments that did not include the strategy. (FL)

Discusses writers, readers, and the enactment of roles in society through the notion of "textual community." Considers the meaning of the term "text" in this context, the problem of reading, and some of the behavioral principles that lie behind personal and group narratives. (JD)

Discusses ways of relating students' personal experiences to complex modern literature such as Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist" and Eliot's "The Wasteland" so that they can better understand and relate to these texts. Also discusses the use of paintings to help students see the literature and then analyze it. (SRT)

Shows how the enthymeme can organize a reader's participation in the text, specifically, George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant." (SRT)

Presents some personal experimental work relating to world metaphors together with that of others working in the areas of logic, psychology, and philosophy. (NKA)

Concludes that thematic organizers improved middle school students' performance on several measures of literal and inferential comprehension and facilitated more complete recall of text ideas and the ability to elaborate upon implied information. (FL)

Concludes that poor readers' comprehension of stories was improved by instruction that focused on causal structure, but that a few learners still struggling with basic decoding were too preoccupied to attend to story structure. (FL)

Raises three issues concerning the activity of writing and its relation to texts and cultures: (1) knowledge as the basis for the activity of writing, (2) the varying nature of the activity itself and how that activity is shaped by context, and (3) the perceived nature of the written work in a given culture. (HOD)

Describes a method used to teach freshman students how to make research a conscious part of their reading and writing processes, by helping them use their personal associations with a text and their questions about a text, to compose meaning and become conscious of the activities they are performing. (HTH)

Describes a technique that helped less-able fourth grade readers develop a better understanding of story parts and how they fit together. Explains that the technique also improved reading comprehension. (FL)

Students frequently react negatively to the idea that they are going to study Shakespeare, but many teachers get students excited about studying Shakespeare by involving them in their learning. In this article, the author describes how she developed and implemented a plan to engage students in Shakespeare. She set the stage by transforming the…

This paper discusses how to change English-as-a-Second-Language reading instruction within Japanese senior high schools into communication, or interaction between students and the text. It focuses on the use of top-down skills to increase reading comprehension, noting that Japanese teachers tend to naturally emphasize bottom-up skills and neglect…

This theme issue of the NCREL's (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory's) "Learning Point" focuses on how reading engages children. The cover story article is an interview (Marianne Kroeger and Stephanie Blaser) with Mary Foertsch, from NCREL, on what types of innovative strategies teachers employ to help students become engaged readers. A…

This experimental study examined the effects of multimedia on Internet news readers, in particular focusing on Web site design and its effect on comprehension and recall of news stories. Subjects (84 undergraduate students) viewed one of two versions of the same Web site--one with multimedia and one without. The Web site consisted of six stories…