This study examined whether specific relevance instructions affect transfer appropriate processing. Undergraduates (n = 52) were randomly assigned to one of three pre-reading question conditions that asked them what-questions, why-questions, or to read for understanding (i.e., control condition). There were no differences in reading time across…

This study investigated the effect of the title and ambiguity tolerance on the comprehensibility of a non-text. To this end, ten irrelevant sentences from different texts were put together to make two seemingly cohesive and coherent texts. The two texts were exactly the same except for the fact that one of them carried a title whereas the other…

The language of today's twelfth-grade English texts is simpler than that of seventh-grade texts published prior to 1963. No wonder students' reading comprehension has declined sharply. The author claims that literacy level of secondary students is languishing because the kids are not reading what they need to be reading. In this article, the…

This paper explores how five third-graders constructed meaning in three school-based literacy participation structures, also examining teachers' invitations and the space they make for students' talk and students' comprehension practices. High-stakes assessments and mandated reading curriculum influence how comprehension is framed and how students…

Two experiments investigate the question of why dialogues tend to be easier for anyone to understand than monologues. One possibility is that overhearers of dialogue have access to the different perspectives provided by the interlocutors, whereas overhearers of monologue have access to the speaker's perspective alone (Fox Tree, 1999). Directors…

A number of studies claim that knowledge of 5,000-8,000 of the most frequent words should provide at least 95% coverage of most unsimplified texts in English, arguably enough to guess or ignore most unknown words while reading (Hirsh & Nation, 1992; Hu & Nation, 2000; Laufer, 1991; Nation, 2006). However, perhaps hidden in that 95% figure…

Identity is a transitive relation, according to all standard accounts. Necessarily, if "x = y" and "y = z," then "x = z." However, people sometimes say that two objects, "x" and "z," are the same as a third, "y," even when "x" and "z" have different properties (thus,…

The activities described in this article, Prediction Path and Quotation Cafe, are adapted from the IRA book "Building Reading Comprehension Habits in Grades 6-12." They highlight the reading comprehension habit of making inferences and predictions, which can be used across content areas and grade levels. In creating this toolkit of activities, the…

Research findings show that deaf learners who read at or below the fourth-grade reading level may lack phonological processing, which include the ability to decode phonetically spelled English words. The purpose of this case study was to determine how severely profound deaf adults will respond to instruction in CS in terms of their initial…

This study tests whether the linguistic role of a character in Chinese text affects detection of its constituent radicals. Linguistic role or status of an embedding context (e.g., word) has been shown to affect detection of embedded constituent units (e.g., letters) when reading alphabetic texts. Given significant differences between alphabetic…

Because of their extensive experience with death and dying, hospice volunteers may be more successful at engaging in meaning-making regarding their death-related experiences than their low point life experiences (e.g., job loss). Consequently, their memories of death-related experiences will manifest more meaning-making strategies (e.g.,…

Reading professional Nell K. Duke replies to questions posed via e-mail or Facebook on the topic of expository text.

This article reports on two experiments where undergraduates read five documents on a scientific topic and afterwards answered comprehension questions and wrote either summaries or argument essays on the topic. In the first experiment, students who were instructed to work with the documents for the purpose of summarizing their contents displayed…

The sentences we process in normal conversation tend to refer to information that we are familiar with rather than abstract, unrelated information. This allows for the use of knowledge stores to help facilitate comprehension processes. In many sentence comprehension studies, the stimuli are designed such that the use of world knowledge is limited.…

Fishbone diagrams, also known as Ishikawa diagrams or cause-and-effect diagrams, are one of the many problem-solving tools created by Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa, a University of Tokyo professor. Part of the brilliance of Ishikawa's idea resides in the simplicity and practicality of the diagram's basic model--a fish's skeleton. This article describes how…