Identifies three problem areas in teaching students with limited English proficiency to read: (1) the readers' input (what they bring to the reading process), (2) the author's input, and (3) the reading process itself. Recommends that teachers acquaint themselves with students' prior knowledge and language competence level and strive for a balance…

Examines the experience of reading student writing by holding it against current views of reading from literary theory and composition studies. Describes this experience as a concentrated effort at once to read and not to "read" the student writing. (MS)

Examines the strategies first grade students use when reading two types of materials--basal and student-authored. Finds that children used more efficient strategies and had better comprehension when reading student-authored stories. (MM)

Offers an approach to text analysis that discusses what makes good writing good. Argues that good writing involves the presentation of propositions that are not too dense, in a schema that is familiar or explained carefully, requiring not much inference on the part of the reader, and in a pattern that is coherent from beginning to end. (MS)

Explores opposing theoretical views on the effects of text underlining and reports on a study of 67 college freshmen. Finds that the subjects who generated their own underlining did not perform significantly better than those who were given experimenter-generated marking. (SKC)

Explores how several kinds of metadiscourse that convey interpersonal meanings affect readers. Describes results of an immediate recall test given on two informative paragraphs which contained some modality markers. Discusses possible roles of modality markers in discourse processes. (KEH)

The relationship of syntactic sensitivities to fluency and understanding are usually neglected when discussing reading fluency. The article describes oral reading and interpretation activities in one seventh grade class undertaken to improve comprehension and fluency. It also discusses evaluation methods, such as portfolios and recordings as…

Uses a cognitive processing perspective to revise fifth grade social studies texts, to describe those revisions, and to demonstrate their effects empirically. Finds that students reading the revised text recalled more material and answered more questions correctly than did those reading the original text. Concludes that a text-processing approach…

When students are learning to write, one-to-one teacher-student conversations taking place around the students' writing and writing processes are especially important. Two examples illustrate the multiple and connected processes of reading and writing that are associated with composing in a high school English class. The first conversation, in a…

Commercially developed basal reading programs are used in most elementary school classrooms in the United States. Yet often neither the publishers developing these programs nor the members of textbook adoption committees selecting programs are able to take advantage of the best available knowledge about the reading process and reading instruction.…

Focusing on the importance of the search for meaning in reading, the essays in this book address critical reading and the confusion about the place of skill development in the search for meaning. The following works are included: "Introduction to the 50th Yearbook" (M. P. Douglass); "The Quest for Meaning" (M. Poplin);…

Prompted by the growing interest in the role of reader-related and text-related variables in reading comprehension, a study compared 30 sixth grade students in regular classrooms to 30 language impaired students. The purpose was to assess the relationship of (1) text structure manipulations for simple and complex sentence structure, (2) discourse…

To understand better how readers learn and recall text information, a study examined one prose learning approach--the selective attention strategy (SAS)--in which text elements are processed, given various degrees of attention, and learned according to their perceived importance. Fifty sixth grade students from an inner city school in a large…

Two studies analyzed self-regulatory cognitions of students asked to study complex instruction texts; examined the relationship between self-regulation and performance; assessed self-regulatory processes during learning from text in detail; and examined how pictures integrated in instructional text were processed by learners with different degrees…

Investigates the effect of vocabulary-based and generative-reciprocal inference procedure (GRIP) training on third grade readers' comprehension. Reports that the GRIP group outperformed control and basal inference groups on various inferential transfer tasks, indicating that strategies which help students attend to text clues aid in making…