Identifies and describes the genres that a group of tertiary level English-as-a-Second-Language students produced during a process writing class in which they were free to decide their own topics, purposes, and audiences. Characteristics of these genres, the relationships among them, and their schematic structures are described. (Author/VWL)

Investigates four experiments on whether the addition of a representative picture to a news item improves recall of that item by undergraduate students in journalism courses. Finds that it does; that concrete news items were recalled better than abstract news items; and news concreteness was strongly correlated with various picture attributes,…

Describes a method content teachers in the middle and upper grades can use to teach their traditional content topics with a focus on the content information, the content's organizational plan, and strategies to help students "deep process" the content. Describes the three-stage implementation. Notes evidence that applying and practicing the…

This paper presents preliminary results from classroom-initiated research using text-graphing to develop metacognitive awareness among English-as-a-Second-Language engineering students writing the literature review section of their master's theses. Results found that text graphing can raise students' awareness of the rhetorical structure of…

The nonword phonotactic frequency effect in verbal short-term memory (STM) is characterized by superior recall for nonwords containing familiar as opposed to less familiar phoneme associations. This effect is supposed to reflect the intervention of phonological long-term memory (LTM) in STM. However the lexical or sublexical nature of this LTM…

A naturalistic study explored a classroom in which multiple history text resources were present and actively used by fifth-grade students. The teacher used the textbook and supplemented it with a wide assortment of trade books. Students worked in small groups of 3 to 5 students. Data included field notes of classroom observations and in-depth…

Connecting visual and print literacies in the classroom can bridge distances in students' experiences, because all literacies are complementary and interdependent. This article discusses this rationale for connecting students' communication experiences in and out of classrooms to foster relevant literacies needed in contemporary society. Next it…

A study investigated how a knowledge or lack of knowledge of basic text structures, such as comparison and contrast and cause and effect, contributes to the reading process in remedial adolescent readers. By observing a group of graduate students and through the close study of a few adolescent case studies, a researcher attempted to determine if…

A study investigated whether children reading an informational story recalled more information and perform better on a delayed test than those who read a textbook containing many of the same ideas. Subjects, 58 fifth-grade students from a suburban public school with approximately equal percentages of African-American and Caucasian children from a…

This report describes the second phase of a study of the transformations students make in their written texts as they write from sources in a given discipline. Phase 1 of the study examined how students performed the task of writing a critique of a scholarly article in sociology and how their efforts were evaluated by professors in the discipline.…

A study examined the ways in which Head Start preschool children's vocabulary developed when they and their mothers engaged in joint reading. Subjects, 19 dyads, were observed as they interacted around expository texts presented in both familiar (newspaper toy advertisements) and traditional (trade books) formats. Subjects were observed in their…

A qualitative study examined the ways in which middle school and high school students create meanings when they are reading literary and non-literary texts. Subjects, 18 seventh-grade and 18 eleventh-grade students attending schools in an inner city or a suburban school district and judged by their teachers to be either above, at, or below average…

A study examined the relationship between text schemata and comprehension monitoring to determine elementary school children's detection and remediation of internal inconsistencies in narrative and expository passages. Data were elicited (through computerized experimental reading passages containing internal inconsistencies) from 87 students in…

A study investigated the influence of key factors (general comprehension ability, prior knowledge of passage topic, interest in passage topic, and locus of control) on training at-risk college students in the use of graphic organizers as a cognitive learning strategy. Subjects, 60 college freshmen required to take a developmental reading/study…

Three studies examined the impact of different instructional reading materials and subsequent analysis of comprehension by retellings. The first study investigated the influence of the presentation of the material. Subjects, 83 freshmen enrolled in a biology course, were shown one of four combinations of course material involving a slide…