Reviews some of the basic notions of semiotics to show how they can be applied to composition teaching. (FL)

Bookstore owner advocates freedom for children in exploring and choosing books. Regrets tendencies of some adults to curb children's curiosity and self-displayed interests, while complaining of the child's lack of interest in reading. (SD)

The relationship between reading comprehension and the number and complexity of idea units in a text was examined. The results showed that readers using text-entailed recall strategies gained the most insight into the meaning of text and that recall ability is an important encoding strategy for gaining meaning. (JAZ)

Indicates that adding large amounts of supportive information to basal reader stories increased children's story understanding and enhanced their interest in the stories, but had no effect on reading rate or the amount of important information included in story retellings. (FL)

Examines teachers' decisions to make adjustments in their preplanned discussion routines to better facilitate students' comprehension of previously assigned content area materials in terms of how texts figured into those decisions. (FL)

Describes a three-week seminar for education students that simulated the environment of the classrooms in which they will eventually teach and focused on the writing process, the reading process, and the reading-writing relationship. (SRT)

Discusses the concepts of play and imagination and how these shape personal development and the knowledge gained through experience with reading and writing. (SRT)

Studies how children negotiate the meaning of literature by examining how they responded when given the opportunity to retell a story directly after hearing it. (DF)

Reports a study designed to answer the question of whether English as a second language (ESL) reading can be facilitated by explicit teaching of text structure. Results indicate that training on the top-level rhetorical organization of expository texts significantly increased the amount of information that 25 intermediate-level ESL students could…

Discusses "critique" in an analysis of the relationship between discourse, text, and subjectivity, particularly as it relates to the teaching of poetry. Stresses how to make students more aware of the power of the text and to comprehend more fully the nature of their own responses. Illustrates with student responses to Blake's poem, "The Rose."…

Reading in the Malaysian primary and secondary school system is largely a master of skill mastery and school textbooks, workbooks and even examinations are a testament to this approach. The teacher of reading is often forced to make the choice of training her learners to read and answer comprehension questions for examination purposes. Reading in…

Reader's Theatre can be used to combine basic literature and writing instruction with creative arts. Improvisational playmaking by students, using literature in the form of plays, prose, and poetry, forms the basis of Reader's Theatre. Use of Reader's Theatre in the classroom can: (1) foster deeper understanding of character, setting, and plot…

The purpose of this article is to explain each of the three phases of reading textbooks and to provide strategies for aiding students to better understand and connect to their textbooks in each of these phases. Each of the three phases is named for its writing counterpart: planning, drafting, and evaluating. This article also states that three…

Examined effects of using textbook alternatives on six fifth graders' experiences learning about American history. Found that students preferred alternative texts. Using multiple sources raised no questions for students about validity and reliability of evidence. Students used an information-quantity criterion to judge validity of evidence. Three…

Explores creating a thesaurus from a cognitive viewpoint, based on a system that organizes its knowledge representation/classification according to the authors' and users' images of the subject domain, in order to increase user-text interaction. Discusses the general framework, methods for implementing author-text structures, and an approach…