Examines the issue of what makes information important by examining the influences of three factors--category membership, normative relative importance, and goal-relatedness. Finds that all three factors influenced the perceived importance of information to some extent; however, normative relative importance influenced writing tasks more strongly…

Argues that a model of metaphorical thinking developed by 18th-century Italian rhetorician Giambattista Vico demonstrates how meaning is constructed in the reading process. Presents key Vichian concepts, followed by an explanation of how metaphors are created to construct new meaning. Compares the process to an interactive model of reading. (RS)

Describes the process of reading the hypertext read-only file "WOE" (included on a disk with this journal) in which voices, memories, influences, and the process of text production all converge, rejecting the objective model of reality as the great "either/or" and embracing, instead, the "and/and/and." (SR)

Explores the ways in which 11- and 12-year-old students used intertextuality within diverse literacy events in a classroom context. Reveals different patterns of intertextual connections depending on discourse mode (oral or written) and the functional context of discourse (literary or informational) in terms of the types of sources to which…

Explores the notion of meaning, especially as applied to acts of producing and reading texts. Grounds the analysis in principles of activity theory and cultural semiotics and focuses on the ways in which reading takes place among readers and texts in a culturally mediated, codified, experience characterized as the "transactional zone."…

In four experiments, Japanese readers were required to switch between reading words in Kanji and Kana. In every case, performance was significantly slower and less accurate on the trials following a change of script. (Author/VWL)

A theory of how children progress through different phases of reading should be an asset both to reading researchers and teachers alike. The present paper provides a brief review of Ehri's influential four phases of reading development: pre-alphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic and consolidated alphabetic. The model is flexible enough to…

Sequential attention shift models of reading predict that an attended (typically fixated) word must be recognized before useful linguistic information can be obtained from the following (parafoveal) word. These models also predict that linguistic information is obtained from a parafoveal word immediately prior to a saccade toward it. To test these…

This dissertation study describes and interprets the dialogue between Latino parents and their children during home literature conversations. The participating students were enrolled in my first and second grade classroom in East Los Angeles, California. I was guided by the following research questions in this qualitative teacher research study:…

The democratic aim of American education is to provide "all" students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to become informed, effective, and responsible citizens. Like civic education itself, literacy education can be embraced by all teachers across all disciplines. There are strategies that all teachers can use to help address…

The democratic aim of American education is to provide "all" students with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to become informed, effective, and responsible citizens. Like civic education itself, literacy education can be embraced by all teachers across all disciplines. There are strategies that all teachers can use to help address…

Integrating comprehension and vocabulary instruction in read-alouds can help teachers make the very most of class time. The curriculum described illustrates how read-alouds, when implemented with strategic purpose, can boost learners' vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Specifically, the author presents guidelines for: (1) selecting…

Today more than ever, educators are challenged to meet the literacy needs of all learners in increasingly diverse classrooms. To help them meet this challenge, author Susan E. Israel, shows how to use metacognitive assessments to adapt literacy instruction to elementary students' individual needs. This book supplies teachers with easy access to…

The most prominent theories of reading consider reading comprehension ability to be a direct consequence of lower-level reading skills. Recently however, research has shown that some children with poor comprehension ability perform normally on tests of lower-level skills (e.g., decoding). One promising line of behavioral research has found…

We investigated processing of metaphoric sentences using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Seventeen healthy subjects (6 female, 11 male) read 60 novel short German sentence pairs with either metaphoric or literal meaning and performed two different tasks: judging the metaphoric content and judging whether the sentence…