The proliferation of new forms of media has given way to a multitude of new text structures, particularly texts designed to alter the receiver's perspectives. Yet, little is known about the ways in which these novel text structures alter the characteristics of the receiver including one's knowledge and beliefs. As such, the purpose of this…

The 2011 Children's Literature Assembly Workshop investigated cultural contexts and relevant issues in children's literature. Award-winning authors, illustrators, and an educator shared their thoughts about writing, illustrating, and teaching multiethnic literature. The panel included author Nikki Grimes, author and illustrator Eric Velasquez,…

This article evaluates the extent to which pre-schoolers' picture books can be viewed as a form of enriched linguistic input. Twenty best-selling picture books were analysed in terms of syntactic constructions and compared with a sample of Child Directed Speech. The findings of the study demonstrate the prevalence of canonical utterances (i.e.…

Whether foreign language writing is rated using analytic rating scales or holistically, the organization of ideas is invariably one of the aspects assessed. However, it is unclear what raters are sensitive to when rating writing for organization. Which do they value more highly, the physical aspects of organization, such as paragraphing and the…

Aim of this study is to determine the effect of narrative and informative text types on Reading Comprehension levels of Primary Education 4th and 5th grade students. Application was fulfilled in 2011-2012 academic year with 134 students in a primary education school in Province Kirsehir. Reading comprehension tests prepared according to text types…

This systematic descriptive historical review was conducted to examine the status and trends in expository text structure instruction efficacy research for first through twelfth grade students. The analysis included sixty studies, which spanned the years 1978 to 2014. Descriptive dimensions of the research included study type, research design,…

Most studies on narrative competence have focused on monolingual subjects, and there are very few studies which address this issue in bilingual subjects dealing with two language systems. In the present case study we analyzed and compared the textual and narrative written skills of three deaf and three hearing adolescents attending eighth grade at…

The purpose of this article is to understand the function, logic, and impact of qualitative systems for analyzing text complexity, focusing on their benefits and imperfections. We identified two primary functions for their use: (a) to match texts to reader ability so that readers read books that are within their grasp, and (b) to unearth, and then…

This paper represents some suggestions towards discourse-analytic approaches for ESL/EFL education, with the focus on identifying the textual forms which can contribute to the textual difficulty. Textual difficulty/comprehensibility, rather than being purely text-based or reader-dependent, is certainly a matter of interaction between text and…

Content area reading comprehension and writing have been a challenge for children in the U.S. schools for many years as evidenced by state and national assessments. One promising solution to the problem is text structure based instruction that promotes strategic selection, encoding, retrieval, and use of information for myriads of activities…

In this article, the authors situate their discussion of diverse narrative structures in the context of oral storytelling practices and postmodern picturebooks. They focus on three contemporary picturebooks: "Don't Read This Book!" (Lewis, 2009), "Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek: A Tall Thin Tale" (Hopkins, 2008), and "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other…

Sustainability is a core 21st-century movement that stresses keeping interrelationships among the environment, human cultures, and economic systems healthy now--and for future generations--across local, regional, national, and global levels. The ideal sustainable community is able to maintain this balance among the social, environmental, and…

The concept of readability has had a variable history, moving from a position where it was considered as a very important topic for those responsible for producing texts and matching those texts to the abilities and needs of learners, to its current declining visibility in the education literature. Some important work has been coming from the USA…

Theoretical education is mainly based on university text-books, which usually include texts not structured according to any theory of text comprehension. Structuring a text is a demanding process. Text should be organized and structured in order to include descriptions on micro and macro-level representation of the knowledge domain. Since this is…

Writing an essay is a very important skill for students to master, but a difficult task for them to overcome. It is particularly true for English as Second Language (ESL) students in China. It would be very useful if students could receive timely and effective feedback about their writing. Automatic essay feedback generation is a challenging task,…