Recent research has suggested that reading involves the mental simulation of events and actions described in a text. It is possible however that previous findings did not tap into processes engaged during natural reading but rather those triggered by task demands. The present study examined whether readers spontaneously mentally simulate the…

This study examined whether reading a refutational or non-refutational text would induce different cognitive processing, as revealed by eye-movement analyses. Unlike a standard expository text, a refutational text acknowledges a reader's alternative conceptions about a topic, refutes them, and then introduces scientific conceptions as viable…

As reading professionals and former middle school teachers, we believe it is essential for teachers to select books thoughtfully, understand the relationship between book selection and student motivation and engagement, and realize the importance of classroom instruction during the reading of literature. Teachers strive to help middle school…

This research investigates the ability of adult proficient readers to predict words that have been fully or partially deleted, without being able to read what came after the blank. Predictions were analyzed for accuracy and if inaccurate for their grammatical nature, syntactic and semantic acceptability, and retention of the author's meaning.…

In this paper we look at what the critical tradition in education has to offer to the phenomenon of social media. Through an overview and evaluation of the approaches advocated by practitioners of critical literacy and critical media literacy, we illustrate the limitations of applying these frameworks to the fluid and densely interwoven spaces of…

According to multicomponent models (Oakhill & Cain, 2007a), text comprehension is a complex process that requires the processing of explicit (i.e., information presented in the text) and implicit information (i.e., information inferable from the text or from previous knowledge), and involves various components. This study investigated (a)…

Two measures of syntactic complexity, clauses per T-unit and words per clause, were used to examine differences among four genres of text--narrative, descriptive, compare/contrast, and persuasive--written by the same two cohorts (83 students in grades three and five and 96 students in grades five and seven) on two occasions 2 years apart as part…

One focus of "Invitational Theory and Practice" is creating positive environments that summon each individual to "develop intellectually, socially, physically, emotionally, and morally" (Purkey & Novak, 2008). Children's literature is a rich resource for teachers and parents to focus on emotional and moral development. This…

As a predominant discourse of the early twenty-first century, the new capitalism (and its companion cultural system, neoliberalism) privilege flexibility, risk, emotional intelligence, and the enterprising self. New capitalist discourses exert powerful and pervasive effects across all dimensions of human experience and activity from personal…

As students make the transition from learning to read to reading to learn, they find themselves increasingly isolated (Fang 2008; Guthrie and Davis 2003). Gone are the picture books and read alouds of their elementary years; instead, they are faced with dense nonfiction texts and the direction to read and learn the facts. In addition, many science…

Publishing graded readers is big business, but there is evidence that the texts themselves are not being read in sufficient quantity to improve language proficiency. This article reports on a study of graded readers, focusing on interviews with some major publishers of graded readers, to investigate their production rationales. The findings…

This study uses data from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy to identify relationships between parents' demographic/socioeconomic backgrounds and their self-reported frequencies of engaging in early childhood education activities. It also examines race/ethnicity-related disparities in the frequency of reading to children and using…

This report describes an individualized literacy intervention program that was developed for a fifth grade boy who struggled with reading. Based upon informal assessment and evaluation procedures, the following literacy strategies were taught within a one-to-one instructional setting: Repeated Readings, Personal Vocabulary Journal, Phonemic…

This article is concerned with how meaning potential, in particular an individual's personalized meaning potential, emerges from acts of meaning. This happens during different time frames: logogenetic--the creation of meaning in text; ontogenetic--the learning of a personalized meaning potential; and phylogenetic--the evolution of the collective…

Past research on anaphor resolution has investigated the availability of discourse information related to characters that part and reunite. Upon reunion, distant concepts that have been associated with the characters before they separated become more accessible than they were just before the reunion. This phenomenon has been referred to as the…