The aim of this study was to investigate the mental processes university students followed while reading short stories. It also sought to find the common problems in reading and understanding short stories and how linguistic and extralinguistic factors formed those challenges. The total number of the participants was 15 (seven males and eight…

A notable feature of current approaches to reading (in first or second language) is a preoccupation with the internal "causes" of comprehension, regarded as a terminal state of the cognitive system. Yet by allowing only for a private encounter between reader and text, the cognitive approach lacks terms to give more than a contingent…

Noting that register and cohesion are two concepts that define a text, this paper describes register as the variety of language that is appropriate for the situation of the speech event and cohesion as the semantic relations in a text that make it coherent. The first part of the paper discusses three cross-cultural studies of comprehension…

Argues that since the successful teaching of reading does not depend on materials and schemes alone, a teacher who fails to acknowledge cultural factors that influence a pupil's ways of knowing will achieve only limited success. (EL)

Explains how cultural connections, particularly within the context of reading comprehension, require cognitive processes nearly identical to those Vygotsky associated with higher-order conceptual development, examining the discourse of cultural deficit and how sociocultural research has countered its historical patterns, comparing Vygotsky's…

A study examined the concept of the universality or the cultural specificity of the ideal story structure using the J. M. Mandler and N. S. Johnson story grammar. Specifically, the study tested the effect of two different story structures, one a conventional fairy tale and the other a Cree Indian narrative, on the recall of Cree Indian children.…

The task of unscrambling and reordering the sentences for six stories was completed by 455 third, sixth, and ninth grade students from three cultural groups (black, Anglo, and Hispanic) in a study of how sociocultural differences in story schemata affect reading comprehension. The results showed that the greatest effects were for grade level and…

Compares the performance of Black, Hispanic, and Anglo students on a story unscrambling task to determine if sociocultural differences in story schemata affect reading comprehension. Shows some effects suggesting that the three groups have somewhat different strategies for choosing initial and final sentences and for making narratives coherent.…

Focusing on the social nature of reading instruction provides another direction to research and study that both differs from and adds to cognitive research. H. Mehan's theory of social constructivism emphasizes that the development of cognitive processes occurs within the individual through the internalization of interactions between learners and…

The effect of cultural background knowledge on comprehension and on the language of recall was investigated using an oral presentation. Fifteen Aboriginal women in northern Australia and 15 American women in an adult education class in Illinois were matched in age and educational level. Two stories were read aloud to the subjects, each based on…

This quarterly newsletter includes a variety of articles on the teaching of English as a second language. The first article discusses the use of the enquiry method and problem solving as classroom procedures. This approach involves the development of four cognitive processes: framing questions, imposing order on data, making extrapolations, and…