Discussion of computer-assisted learning (CAL) versus book learning focuses on software called a book emulator that was applied to CAL to reflect desirable attributes of learning from books. A project at the University of York that used the book emulator in an electronics course is described, and future possibilities are suggested. (12 references)…

Paints a portrait of a students' varied experiences with literature, and explains how the teacher brings the reading process to a conscious level with students and parents to help them appreciate readers' strengths. Intertwines several case studies of students and their awareness (or lack of awareness) of their own reading strategies. (RS)

Describes sentence collecting, an activity in which students do outside reading that may include content area textbooks, and bring to class interesting sentences found in their reading. Maintains that sentence collecting helps to model reading as a dynamic cognitive and social process in which readers participate actively. (SR)

Investigated the effect of causal structure revisions to school texts on the comprehension of more- and less- skilled undergraduates. Found that readers at both skill levels benefited from the revisions but only for the difficult text. (JPB)

Students say that teachers can "suck" for several reasons. Teachers suck when they are repetitive, boring, assume the worst about their students or refuse to listen to students' explanations for their apparent misbehavior, have too many rules, assign a task that seems impossible, talk too much, or when they separate students from a friend or a…

This study investigated the effects of linguistic simplification and content schemata on reading comprehension and recall. The participants, 240 Iranian male students of English as a foreign language (EFL), were divided into 4 homogeneous groups, each consisting of 60 participants (30 with high proficiency and 30 with low proficiency). To elicit…

Reading is invisible. Any report of another's reading (beyond the level of word recognition) must rely on some kind of reproduction of the actual experience; there is no way to tap into the experience itself. After completing a pilot study, a small number of adolescents--5 eighth graders and 5 eleventh graders read the first four chapters of…

This paper explains two observation guides that teachers can use to describe emergent reading behaviors among young children during the children's interactions with familiar storybooks. The guides are derived from a review of research and focus on independent and assisted interactions. When observing children's independent interactions with…

This monograph elaborates the interactive definition of reading and illustrates how this process, along with inappropriate instruction, can reinforce poor reading behaviors. The monograph also outlines current instructional procedures and proposes new programmatic solutions. The monograph concludes with a list of premises based on recent reading…

Focusing on the ways in which skilled readers detect ironic subtexts in nonfiction prose, a study examined strategies used by readers to infer writers' aims in ironic discourse and compared these strategies with those revealed by other recent reading process studies. Subjects, six graduate students and five college freshmen, were asked to read…

A study examined the ways in which college readers interact with literary texts. The method of interviews and think-along protocols, in which a text was read aloud by the subject while he simultaneously verbalized his thoughts, was used to compare the reading processes of eight college freshman to those of eight masters students in literature who…

The relationship between reading comprehension and the number and complexity of idea units in a text was examined. The results showed that readers using text-entailed recall strategies gained the most insight into the meaning of text and that recall ability is an important encoding strategy for gaining meaning. (JAZ)

The purpose of this article is to explain each of the three phases of reading textbooks and to provide strategies for aiding students to better understand and connect to their textbooks in each of these phases. Each of the three phases is named for its writing counterpart: planning, drafting, and evaluating. This article also states that three…

Reviews previous research on the effects of signals (structural cues that announce or emphasize content or reveal content relationships) on readers' comprehension of expository prose. Concludes that inconsistent results are due to inadequate methodologies that fail to control for confounding variables, such as text length and difficulty, topic…

Discusses ways that teachers may interact with children over texts in order to emphasize the following components of reading comprehension: understanding the meaning-making purpose of reading and writing; viewing reading as a problem-solving process; and learning to share and extend individual comprehension. (RAE)