Reading comprehension is multidimensional and complex. The persistent challenges children, adolescents, and even adults face with reading comprehension call for concerted efforts to develop assessments that help identify sources of difficulties and to design instructional approaches to prevent or ameliorate these difficulties. Doing so requires…

Considers recent developments in literary textual studies, examines characteristics of scholarly editions in paper form, identifies areas in which hypertext would be helpful, and proposes a hypertext model for studying scholarly texts. Improvements to existing software are suggested, and examples from an experimental system using Guide hypertext…

This paper addresses the role of prior knowledge in the comprehension of narrative and expository text, two major categories of discourse. The paper reviews some of the differences in the essence of prior knowledge required to comprehend each text type and then examines research on prior knowledge and conceptual change that deals with both text…

Reviews research about the uses readers and writers make of text structure schemata and, additionally, about what reading-writing relationship research and collaborative learning research suggest for designing instruction to build schemata for text structure. Describes one in-process research study that attempts to address these issues. (SR)

Presents a review of cognitive psychology research dealing with the organization and functioning of oral and written language production mechanisms. Discusses works dealing with the microstructural aspects of language, primarily oral production. Describes how the research perspective has evolved from modular to connectionist models. Examines the…