We report 3 studies investigating children's and adults' interpretation of ambiguous focus in sentences containing the focus-sensitive quantifier only. In each experiment, child and adult participants compared sentences with only in a preverbal position and counterpart sentences without only against a series of pictures depicting events that…

Current electronic text formats can hinder the acquisition of main ideas or the central representation of a text unless some structural cues are embedded in the reading environment. This principle is based on the premise of cognitive psychology that learning is a reorganization of cognitive structure and that readers are most likely incapable of…

Readers construct at least 2 interrelated mental representations when they comprehend a text: a textbase and a situation model. Two experiments were conducted with recognition memory to examine how domain knowledge and text coherence influence readers' textbase and situation-model representations. In Experiment 1, participants made remember-know…

We examined whether the text understanding of students holding naive and sophisticated epistemological beliefs was differentially affected by text format, also controlling for effects of gender, word decoding, and prior knowledge on understanding. The participants were 39 Norwegian first-year teacher students, and the topic of reading was…

Research-based instructional priorities for text organization and curriculum design are reviewed, with special attention to the needs of diverse learners. Research indicates that the physical presentation of text and text structure help students learn information in textbooks and reading materials. Students can apply their awareness of…

A study investigated the effects of inserting questions in a computer-mediated text that required readers to review relevant portions of the text when a question was answered incorrectly. Undergraduate students (n=36) served as their own controls while reading a scientific text under 3 treatment conditions that varied as to the consequences of an…

This study explored 330 third- and fifth-grade Maryland students' motivation to read using the Motivation to Read Profile (MRP). The first part of the MRP, a Likert-type, self-report, group-administered questionnaire, was completed by all students. The second part of the MRP, the Conversational Interview, was individually administered to a random…

This article analyzes the function of deixis in the poetry of the 20th century Italian, Eugenio Montale, in particular, his "In limine." The main objective is to show how deixis is involved in the dynamic relationship between text and reader. A constant problem in Montale's texts is that of a disharmony felt by the poetic voice with the…

This study extends earlier research on headings use in undergraduate testing, and examined whether headings within multiple-choice tests positively impact test performance. Participants were employees (n=143) of a large manufacturing plant in the western United States. The experimental group received a multiple-choice recertification test with…

For much of this century, text linguists have recognized that various tokens called "metadiscourse" may help explain how texts function. In linguistics, metadiscourse has a more concrete meaning than it typically does in composition: it refers to specific words, phrases, and clauses which are primarily intended to help the reader…

The goal of genre theory is to construct useful similarities between different texts. It is the meaning-making practices of a community, and particularly its system of intertextuality that determine which possible similarities will count as significant. Whether educators approach genre as a rule or a resource is a moral choice. Rules restrict,…

A study examined a set of 78 journal articles identified as influential in technical communication (published between 1988 and 1992) and a preliminary list of 63 articles frequently cited between 1993 and 1997. The texts were organized into six topical groups: profession, rhetoric and composition, document design, social construction and…

Nine papers from a British conference on applied linguistics are compiled in this report. Introductory comments point out the traditional primacy of spoken language while acknowledging the demand for literacy and the importance of the written mode. Papers and authors are as follows: "An Educational Theory of (Written) Language" (Michael Stubbs);…

To analyze the appropriateness of textual media in the construction of meaning, this paper first provides a review of the psychological research on semiotics and multiple intelligences that supports a broadened notion of text. The paper next reports on preliminary research on the construction of non-print texts in disciplines other than…

This paper discusses aspects of signaling structure by means of textual organizers in Finnish and French academic discourse. The assumption that there exist culture-bound conventions for marking textual organization by either explicit or implicit linguistic means was explored. Observations are offered of French and Finnish articles and summaries…