The effects of conceptual change text and application questions in 139 college students' learning of electricity concepts were investigated. The experiment was a 2X2X2X2 factorial. Compared to traditional text and no questions, conceptual change text and application questions, respectively, improved acquisition of qualitative concepts.…

Presents a linguistic description of the schematic organization of 40 journal articles from three academic journals in computing research. Results indicate the introduction-methods-results-discussion research reporting pattern can not be applied to computer science articles, with the central part (methods- results) departing most from the…

Evaluates four commercial reading programs at the second, fourth, and sixth grade levels with respect to main idea instructional practices and readability of text. Evaluates the type of main idea tasks and main idea statements, as well as placement of explicit main idea statements in the text. Discusses implications for practitioners meeting…

Investigates effectiveness of three training programs for English as a Foreign Language university students in reading and listening comprehension. Finds that: students who learned rhetorical patterns of written expository texts and text mapping strategies demonstrated better comprehension of lectures than students who performed other activities;…

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)

Investigates whether 11-year-old children in Singapore, from English Dominant or English Non-Dominant backgrounds, read better orally when words were presented in list or text. Finds that readers with less exposure to English relied more on contextual information than more experienced readers, and that reading miscues varied according to whether…

Offers brief annotations of 18 books for young adults which are the author's favorites: books that break new ground with unusual styles and formats; that discuss hitherto taboo topics; and present fresh distinctive new voices for readers. (SR)

Discusses the Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) that is an instructional activity designed to help students work with a standard feature of reading: answering questions based on a text. Asserts that the QAR strategy has tremendous potential to help students learn important social studies content through the study of children's literature. (CMK)

Many students from elementary school through college encounter difficulty understanding their science textbooks, regardless of whether they have language disorders. This article discusses some of the particular difficulties associated with science text comprehension and possible remedies for facilitating and enhancing comprehension of challenging…

The paper examines two basic modes of text building, first proposed by Sinclair 1994. It argues that these textbuilding means are not just different, but are, rather, operational opposites. It suggests that this difference means that ESL learners who first acquire one mode of text building are, by this means, also equipped with the wherewithal to…

Five experiments investigated the interpretation of quantified noun phrases in relation to discourse structure. They demonstrated, using questionnaire and on-line reading techniques, that readers in English prefer to give a quantified noun phrase in (VP-external) subject position a presuppositional interpretation, in which the noun phrase limits…

This article describes an autobiographical writing assignment completed by students and faculty that is shared in an off-site retreat. It highlights an approach to learning about human diversity that blends affective and behavioral approaches with more traditional cognitive methods. It supports the interrogation of student and instructor…

Efforts to improve civic education face a conundrum. On the one hand, students report that they are more likely to learn about democracy and citizenship through reading textbooks than through any other activity and according to the National Education Association, reading is the gateway to learning in all content areas. However, reviews of textbook…

One source of potential difficulty for struggling readers is the variability of texts across grade levels. This article explores the use of automatic natural language processing techniques to identify dimensions of variation within a corpus of school-appropriate texts. Specifically, we asked: Are there identifiable dimensions of lexical and…

Anticipating a possible future method of newspaper design (including multimedia content) and delivery, a study examined the interface among people, modality (paper, computer, multimedia), and three types of news story (news, sports, entertainment). The "primacy of print" theory (which predicts that information will be recalled better…