Research to guide text structure interventions for the primary grades is very limited, yet as early as in kindergarten, many state standards increasingly emphasize exposure to challenging expository texts. The purpose of the present study was to provide preliminary evidence of the feasibility and promise (or the effects) of three brief text…

Background: Improving children's oral language skills is an important focus of educational research and practice; however, relatively few interventions have demonstrated impacts on these skills. This work makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the effects of language-focused interventions in pre-kindergarten settings by examining…

Background: Improving children's oral language skills is an important focus of educational research and practice; however, relatively few interventions have demonstrated impacts on these skills. This work makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the effects of language-focused interventions in pre-kindergarten settings by examining…

Despite the dynamic and interactive features of digital text, the visual design guidelines for digital text are similar to those for printed text. The purpose of this study was to develop visual design guidelines for improving learning from dynamic and interactive digital text and to validate them by controlled testing. Two structure design…

The purpose of this paper is to suggest ways that cross-disciplinary (non-ESL) faculty can help developmental immigrant students succeed in undergraduate programs. We present five key issues that faculty should consider when teaching these students and when reading their writing. Finally, we offer experience-based, practical suggestions on how to…

Readers attempt to build coherent representations for what they read, but those representations may fail to capture the actual content of texts. For example, although narrative situations often change dramatically as plots unfold, readers do not necessarily revise what they know to accurately represent the current state of affairs in a text. This…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a comprehension program integrated with social studies instruction designed for at-risk second graders. The program included instruction in cause-effect text structure, emphasizing clue words, generic questions, graphic organizers, and the close analysis of specially constructed cause-effect target…