The goal of this practice guide is to offer educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in kindergarten through 3rd grade. This guide is a companion to the existing practice guide, "Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade", and as a set, these guides…

The commentary argues for an understanding of how texts are put together that accounts for multimodality and draws on children's ways of being and doing in the home, their "habitus". It focuses on identities as socially situated. It argues that it is important to trace the process of sedimenting identities during text production. This offers a way…

A highly practical resource for the classroom, this book offers clear, research-based recommendations for helping students at all grade levels understand and learn from what they read. Explaining the skills and strategies that good readers use to comprehend text, the authors show how to support struggling students in developing these skills. They…

An investigation was undertaken into the possibility of automatically detecting how concepts exist in relation to each other in abstracts, a text-type commonly used in free-text retrieval. The end goal of this research is to capture these relationships in structured representations of abstracts' contents so that users can require not only that the…

The study found that college student writers with learning disabilities (N=35) produced better coherent written text than did underprepared non-disabled students. LD writers appeared to understand text structure like normally achieving writers but, like the underprepared writers, they experienced difficulty in the production process. (Author/DB)

The study examined the use of expository text structure as a reading and writing strategy with 15 learning-disabled adolescents, 15 normally achieving adolescents, and 15 normally achieving fourth graders. Two reading tasks required students to recognize sequence or comparison-contrast text structure. The third task required students to write…

A study measured the effects that direct instruction in narrative text structure using a story map (called "macrostruction") had on the comprehension of average and above average sixth-grade readers. A 2 x 2 x 2 repeated measures design was used with time, text, and treatment as the independent variables. The number of story grammar idea…

Offers a review of research conducted on reading comprehension, focusing on studies of the cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of the meaning of the microstructures and macrostructures of a text. (DMM)

Emphasizes the importance of terminology in an age of machine-based translation systems. Discusses differences between lexicography and terminology. Concludes with an argument for a new system based on the Text Encoding Initiative-based notions of elements and attributes. (CFR)

Describes problems in devising a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) encoding format for dictionaries. Asserts that the high degree of structuring and compression of information are among the most complex text types treated in the TEI. Concludes that the source of some TEI problems lies in the design of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). (CFR)

Narratives from three studies were analyzed using seven variables hypothesized to measure a variety of language abilities used in narrative production. Results indicated that the variables represented global organization of content, and within- and across-sentence structure. Variables representing sentence structure were most effective as…

Identifies problems and proposes solutions for encoding verse texts in Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Discusses formal properties that distinguish verse from prose. Recommends that metrical and rhyme conventions always be tagged at the highest possible level of text divisions. (CFR)

A study found that both paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects of text were important for signifying meaning of text in the reading comprehension of 102 Australian students at 3 age levels (10, 12, and 14 years). Underlying comprehension problems was a lack of prior experience of text topics. Reading preparation through developing shared meanings is…

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…

Presents a review of cognitive psychology research dealing with the organization and functioning of oral and written language production mechanisms. Discusses works dealing with the microstructural aspects of language, primarily oral production. Describes how the research perspective has evolved from modular to connectionist models. Examines the…