This study evaluated a model of reading skills among early adolescents (N=174). Measures of family history, achievement, cognitive processes and self-perceptions of abilities were obtained. Significant relationships were found between family history and children's single-word reading skills, spelling, reading comprehension, orthographic processing…

High/Scope's approach to education is a blend of Jean Piaget's constructivist theory of child development and the best of traditional teacher experience. The High/Scope approach is about helping students gain knowledge and skills in important content areas, such as language and literacy, initiative and social relations, movement, music, and…

Little cross-cultural empirical research has been devoted to expectations for academic performance of study abroad (SA) students, particularly in their foreign language (FL) reading. This study explored premobility English and French FL reading comprehension and strategy use in 177 European SA students of law and economics. Our concern was whether…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) proficiency affects pragmatic comprehension, namely the ability to comprehend implied meaning in spoken dialogues, in terms of accuracy and speed of comprehension. Participants included 46 native English speakers at a U.S. university and 160 Japanese students of English in a college in Japan who…

Our editor-at-large puts questions to a political scientist--the former higher-education advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq--who replies with skepticism about prospects for our efforts to restore a university system in Iraq and reconstitute that troubled society in our image. Building an informed democracy, John Agresto…

There are many questions to be asked about the pedagogical practice of questioning. Questions provide insight into what students at any age or grade level already know about a topic, which provides a beginning point for teaching. Questions reveal misconceptions and misunderstandings that must be addressed for teachers to move student thinking…

This paper reports an experiment that addresses whether manipulating foreknowledge of output tasks leads to differences in reading behaviour, text comprehension and noticing of language form. Three tasks are used: reading for memorization, reading for retelling and reading for visualization. Reading for memorization and reading for retelling are…

This study compared a story-based video instructional package, with a feature-length film as its focus, to a text-based program. It explored the effectiveness of each approach to enhance the listening and grammar performances of intermediate-level college French students. Twenty-seven students at two institutions participated. A pretest-posttest…

This paper examines the ways in which young children construct and negotiate musical meaning as song-makers in a post-modern consumerist musical world. A critical analysis of the presentation of music in two popular Australian children's television programmes (Play School and Hi-5) and the ways in which such media impact upon children's…

Nine 12th grade students, attending the science section of the upper secondary school in Cyprus, were individually interviewed about their understanding of the changes associated with the process of oxidation/combustion. Each student was instructed to firstly predict what would happen when heating a piece of copper wire or a piece of magnesium…

D. V. M. Bishop and M. J. Snowling (2004) proposed that 2 dimensions of language are required to conceptualize the relationship between dyslexia and specific language impairment: phonological skills and wider language skills beyond phonology (grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic skills). In this article, we discuss the commonalities between…

Adopting a literacy perspective towards student interactions with digital media can extend and develop views of second language (L2) listening comprehension. In this case study, variations in "play" are grounded in a media literacy perspective as a way to frame student work with authentic videotext. Twenty-two Australian students of…

This study investigates prospective relationships between phonemic awareness and reading performance during the first year of Finnish primary school. Pedagogical interest lay in finding out whether systematic use of phonics in reading instruction supported children's reading performance even if children can already decode. A total of 85 children…

Generally, experts agree on what good readers do to comprehend text--they connect new text with past experiences, interpret, evaluate, synthesize, and consider alternative interpretations. Yet, traditional measures of reading comprehension only provide a general indicator of how well a student understands text. They do not provide information…

This research focuses on the ability of book-based animated stories, when well designed and produced, to have positive effects on young viewers' narrative comprehension and language skills. Sixty 5-year-olds, learning Dutch as a 2nd language, were randomly assigned to 4 experimental and 2 control conditions. The children profited to some extent…