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.…

Examined relation of maternal age to 4-year-olds' verbal comprehension and mother-child interactions on a book-sharing task. Found children of mothers ages 35 and over at child's birth scored significantly higher on verbal comprehension than children of younger mothers. Found no maternal age differences on the book-sharing task. Findings pose…

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…

A study of 96 hearing, preservice teachers to determine the effect of including captions in instructional videotapes or caption-viewing strategy instruction found no difference in comprehension under four viewing conditions (non-captioned, captioned, captioned with 2 and 10 minute strategy practice). Concludes that attributing negative effects on…

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…

Summarizes in chronological order the main issues that have been considered in defining primary English (elementary school English) in the United Kingdom as a subject. Discusses the English subject knowledge considered necessary, over time, for teachers to know. Concludes that primary English, when compared with other subjects, is a special case:…

Evaluated the effect of listening to stories on children's vocabulary growth. Children acquired new vocabulary from listening to stories, with both frequency of exposure and teacher explanation of target words enhancing vocabulary learning. The interventions, however, were not sufficient to overcome the Matthew effect, as higher ability children…

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…

Discusses a survey of language instructors that was conducted to examine the relationship between second-language (L2) listening research, pedagogical theory, and practice. Descriptive and qualitative analyses of the responses suggest that there are gaps between L2 listening research and practice. Suggestions for closing this gap are proposed.…

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…

Explores the usefulness of the criterion of authenticity for the selection and evaluation of English for academic purposes materials. Using a student questionnaire and techniques of discourse analysis based on Halliday's concepts of field, tenor, and mode, the levels of difficulty and relevance of materials using four media was investigated.…