Knowledge development, application, and refinement are essential parts of students' reading. One way to observe how students use their knowledge as they read is through talk. Studies routinely indicate that though reading is a social endeavor, teachers spend most of the allotted instructional time talking or using discourse patterns that do not…

In this meta-analysis, the authors synthesize results from 44 (quasi-)experimental studies on informational and narrative text structure interventions involving students in grades 4-6 in regular school settings. Findings show that text structure instruction had positive immediate effects on students' reading comprehension but that effect sizes…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether teaching students about the structure of a text would be associated with improved reading comprehension. Science texts were used with the intention of adding to what is known about content-area reading comprehension. To investigate the effects of teaching science text structure, a reading…

This study was conducted in the province of Québec, Canada, among French-speaking Grade 6 students (n = 175) in the context of a school curriculum that does not clearly address text structure and main idea instruction. It aims to understand whether these students can identify informative text structures and main ideas in isolated paragraphs,…

The present study examined children's digital text comprehension of digital text types linear digital text vs hypertext, with or without graphical navigable overviews. We investigated to what extent individual variation in children's comprehension could be explained by lexical quality (word reading efficiency and vocabulary knowledge), cognitive…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the writing outcomes of 6th-grade students learning English as a second language. Design/methodology/approach: In all 45 students in a text structure instruction (TSI) group were compared with 45 students in a self-regulated strategy instruction (SRSI) group and 43 students receiving traditional writing…

This study examined the thinking processes students engage in while constructing graphic representations of textbook content. Twenty-eight students who either used graphic representations in a routine manner during social studies instruction or learned to construct graphic representations based on the rhetorical patterns used to organize textbook…

This case study examines features and processes of a sixth grade teacher (Jane) utilizing text sets as a tool for facilitating critical thinking. Jane's strong vision and student-centered beliefs informed her use of various texts to teach language arts as she worked to address demands of the Common Core State Standards. Text sets promoted multiple…

The aim of this study was to examine the contribution of transcription skills, oral language skills, and executive functions to growth in narrative writing between fourth and sixth grade. While text length and story content of narratives did not increase with age, syntactic complexity of narratives showed a clear developmental progression. Results…

The aim of this study is to investigate the perception levels of the messages of didactic fiction texts in fictive context and the student's perception levels of these messages. 80 students attending the grades of 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th 20 from each grade, are randomly selected as participants. Under the supervision of specialists, six fictive…

We evaluated the narrative and expository writing samples of 12 adolescents with language-learning disabilities (LLD) in Grades 6 to 12 for elements of microstructure (e.g., productivity, grammatical complexity) and macrostructure (genre-specific text structure elements) using an experimental measure. Writing samples were elicited with…

Teachers in inclusive classrooms are challenged to provide reading instruction for students with a wide range of instructional levels. This article reports on the implementation of guided reading in four middle years inclusive classrooms, the impact on student engagement and reading progress, and teacher perspectives on the guided reading…

Teacher Jennifer Tyler shares her experience of creating a text set for a social studies unit on colonial America.

Children ages 2-18 spend between two and four hours per day watching TV, a calculation that is even higher if DVDs, videos and the Internet are included. Although the amount of television watched by today's children has raised concerns about their literacy development, captions could hold a key to turning television into an educational asset.…

Mostly low-income African American and Hispanic teens (N = 192) were tested in (a) passage comprehension, (b) vocabulary ability, (c) cloze task performance, and (d) listening comprehension in the spring and vocabulary in the fall. Students were surveyed about reading (a) narrative, (b) expository, (c) teen culture, and (d) online texts.…