Close reading is the methodical investigation of a complex text through answering text dependent questions geared to unpack the text's meaning. Close reading directs students to examine and analyze the text through a series of activities that focus students on the meanings of individual words and sentences as well as the overall development of…

The present studies examined whether implied tactile properties during language comprehension influence subsequent direct tactile perception, and the specificity of any such effects. Participants read sentences that implicitly conveyed information regarding tactile properties (e.g., "Grace tried on a pair of thick corduroy pants while…

This study utilized a qualitative, interpretative, analytic technique based on image-based research. This descriptive study was designed to investigate children's perceptions of "good readers" as portrayed in their representational drawings. Children in grades kindergarten through 6, 156 total, in 14 schools in a small, rural school…

According to most theories of text comprehension, readers construct and store in memory at least two inter-related representations: a text base containing the explicit ideas in a text and a discourse model that contains the overall meaning or "gist" of a text. The authors propose a refinement of this view in which text representations are…

In the classroom, teachers have long used videos as an addendum to the instruction they provide. Still, using video is often seen in a negative light and is used sparingly. This column calls upon research from a variety of fields that supports the use of video to enhance literacy instruction in classrooms. Relying on both theory and practice, the…

Explicit instruction on the skill of creating mental imagery from text supports reading comprehension and recall. This article shares a strategy for teaching students how to process what they read by comparing mental imagery to "brain movies." It emphasizes choosing appropriate fiction and nonfiction texts to encourage readers to build the skill…

This article reviews the literature of multimedia glosses in computer assisted language learning (CALL) and their effects on L2 vocabulary acquisition during the past seventeen years. Several studies have touched on this area to examine the potential of multimedia in a CALL environment in aiding L2 vocabulary acquisition. In this review, the…

Referential gaze during situated language production and comprehension is tightly coupled with the unfolding speech stream (Griffin, 2001; Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). In a shared environment, utterance comprehension may further be facilitated when the listener can exploit the speaker's…

Quantifiers are very common in everyday speech, but we know little about their cognitive basis or neural representation. The present study examined comprehension of three classes of quantifiers that depend on different cognitive components in patients with focal neurodegenerative diseases. Patients evaluated the truth-value of a sentence…

Each year, all Australian students in grades 3, 5, 7 and 9 sit nationwide large-scale tests in literacy and numeracy which have their validity frequently questioned. We compared the performance of grade 3 twins on these large-scale reading tests with their performance on three individually administered literacy tests in comprehension, word reading…

The present study investigated whether the recognition of spoken words is influenced by how predictable they are given their syntactic context and whether listeners assign more weight to syntactic predictability when acoustic-phonetic information is less reliable. Syntactic predictability was manipulated by varying the word order of past…

This study attempts to identify the extent of using authentic materials in the new series of secondary English textbooks ("Flying High for Saudi Arabia") used currently in Saudi schools. Therefore, a content analysis instrument has been designed to analyze the first secondary English textbook. The instrument has been distributed on 112…

To be able to support meaningful mathematical experiences, preservice elementary school teachers (PSTs) must learn mathematics in deep and meaningful ways (Ma 1999). They need to experience investigating and making sense of the mathematics they will be called on to teach. To expand their own--often limited--views of what it means to teach and…

This study sought to investigate reading perceptions, computer use perceptions, and online reading comprehension strategy use of 26 students who are deaf/hard of hearing in grades 4 through 8 attending public school districts in a tri-state area of the U.S. Students completed an online questionnaire and descriptive analysis indicated that students…

Effects of wide reading and repeated readings were examined on struggling college readers' silent reading rate and reading comprehension relative to a vocabulary study control condition. Randomly assigned to a condition, community college students (N = 30) completed 25-min sessions individually in class three times a week for three weeks.…