Argues for the adoption of a literacy pedagogy to enable tertiary level students from different language backgrounds to access expository text. The article describes the outcomes of a project exploring whether college freshmen from different language backgrounds had appropriate strategies and awareness levels to understand and retain ideas from…

Fifty-two children identified at ages 4 and 6 as having an expressive phonology disorder were followed to the third and fourth grades. Children with a phonology disorder along with other language problems performed more poorly than the others on measures of phoneme awareness, language, reading decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling.…

This interview with Dr. Michael Pressley discusses the hurdles that struggling readers confront when comprehending text, teaching methods that can be used for improving reading comprehension, the role of special educators and reading specialists in the education of struggling readers, and the need for teachers to teach reading comprehension…

Describes how a sixth-grade teacher modified the reciprocal teaching strategy to use with a group of struggling readers. Describes implementing the strategy, reviews data on effectiveness with her students, and recommends modifications for students engaged in silent reading. (SR)

Explores the impact of analogies and prior content knowledge on reading comprehension of expository texts by both first and second language readers. Written recall protocols were analyzed for two texts. Readers were university students of French or English as a foreign language. Analogy was to have a debilitating effect on comprehension regardless…

Examines language competence and reading comprehension of 7-year olds, focusing on the aims and content of Polish-language teaching in grades I-III. Discussion includes the development of Polish students compared to international standards; language task performance; gender and background influence on competence; and the relationship between…

Examined how skilled adult readers assign meaning to sentences. Of particular interest were sentences containing "experiencer" verbs, which describe states or emotions rather than actions. Subjects were university students in Australia. Test items were semantically implausible sentences. (Author/VWL)

Investigated the effects of written input enhancement and text length on college students' second-language comprehension and intake. First-year Spanish students were exposed to one of four conditions with enhanced and non-enhanced short and long text. Exposing students to short authentic reading materials facilitated reading comprehension but not…

This study evaluated use of a reading comprehension intervention to teach inferential reading to 30 underachieving prelingually deaf readers (ages 9 to 18) using pictorial material and printed text. The two experimental groups made significant reading gains during the 30-week period of intervention as compared to control groups. (Contains…

Describes a strategy adaptable to middle school, high school, and college levels that helps to motivate students to want to read and gain information; promotes discussion and fosters students' learning from one another; helps below-grade-level readers understand content; and encourages higher order thinking. (SR)

Nine elementary students with mild to moderate mental retardation were taught to use a balanced, multimethod, multilevel language arts framework that blended phonics and basal instruction with holistic and contextualized approaches. Children made gains in word identification and reading comprehension strategies, metalinguistics, written language,…

Describes an activity for teaching English that helps students deal with new words in context, grasp meaning of a text before going into detail, and infer the meaning of new words. The activity focuses on three main goals: building an understanding of the text in spite of new vocabulary; coping with new words, and building confidence. (Author/VWL)

Discusses how students read and discuss four selections from the Junior Great Books series, with sixth graders using the "Questioning the Author" approach, and seventh graders using the "Great Books" approach. Reveals that students in the "Questioning the Author" discussions provided longer recalls, and the recalls…

A reading program utilizing five components (a shortcut to phonemic awareness, Adapted Dolch words, Bridge lists and the Bridging process, reading comprehension, and American Sign Language development/language experience stories) resulted in dramatic gains in the reading levels of 48 elementary students at a residential school for the deaf.…

This study compared using explicit rule-based instruction and a basal-reader activity-based approach for teaching 40 fourth-grade students with learning disabilities to determine character motive in three types of narrative texts. Rule-based instruction was superior to the activity-based approach when teaching character motives irrespective of…