Texts appear as the highest level units in language teaching. Textlinguistics researchers have put forward the thesis that the largest linguistic unit is the text, not the sentence. The main purpose of this research is to determine the effect of using textlinguistic analysis method and its ability to aid students in understanding the texts in…

Recent research has demonstrated that knowledge of real-world events plays an important role in guiding online language comprehension. The present study addresses the scope of event knowledge activation during the course of comprehension, specifically investigating whether activation is limited to those knowledge elements that align with the local…

This study builds upon previous work aimed at developing a student model of reading comprehension ability within the intelligent tutoring system, iSTART. Currently, the system evaluates students' self-explanation performance using a local, sentence-level algorithm and does not adapt content based on reading ability. The current study leverages…

In the current study, we utilize natural language processing techniques to examine relations between the linguistic properties of students' self-explanations and their reading comprehension skills. Linguistic features of students' aggregated self-explanations were analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. Results…

Two studies investigated the processing of metaphor, specifically (1) the extent to which metaphor is processed similarly to literal language and (2) the effects of the presence or absence of a specific context on processing. In the first study, 82 college students listened to one of four taped lectures, each containing 22 metaphors. The tapes…

Some of the aspects of the author/reader relationship that make communication possible are discussed in this paper. The paper begins by describing the most important components of that relationship. Next, through an analysis of two readings of one of Aesop's fables, it illustrates the way the author and the reader must depend on these components.…

A study investigated reconstructive recall for linguistic style. It was hypothesized that (1) features of linguistic style would be more difficult to recall than underlying content, (2) reconstructive errors would include stylistic forms recalled as standard forms when subjects lacked productive control of a particular feature of a style, and (3)…

The 34 summaries contained in this collection represent the theoretical positions and the empirical studies of a wide variety of investigators currently working in the field of language comprehension. The entries summarize contributions from the areas of assessment, artificial intelligence, cognition (including schema theory), instruction,…

To investigate the strategies children use in comprehending written stories, third, sixth, and ninth grade students were given scrambled six-sentence stories and asked to reorder them. Three versions of each of six stories were created. The first version was the canonical form of the story predicted by story grammar rules; the second version began…

Examined written language tasks in 120 Gujarati-speaking children from grades two through four to assess the development of such skills in a syllabo-alphabetic writing system. Results indicated that the syllabo-alphabetic system of Devanagari proved to follow the models of reading acquisition constructed for alphabetic systems. (MM)

Focusing on instruction in the English language arts by students for whom English is a second language, this yearbook contains the papers from the precongress institute, "Reading English in Asia," of the tenth International Reading Association World Congress on Reading--held in Hong Kong in 1984. Part 1 contains "Linguistic Theories and L2…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 32 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) textual relations within the written and spoken modes; (2) the construction of stance in conflict narrative; (3) the relational base theory of phrase…

The question of the relationship between children's play and more formal, literate uses of language is explored in the 9 studies described in this volume. Chapter titles and authors are as follows: (1) "The Influence of Discourse Content and Context on Preschoolers' Use of Language" (Lucia A. French, Joan Lucariello, Susan Seidman, and Katherine…