Analyzes five fifth graders' talk about a historical fiction novel. Focuses on students' conversational competence within the three-week unit by examining their developing competence in sustaining topics and themes, taking the perspective of the "other," and developing content and theme understandings. Suggests that these abilities…

Sixth graders at three reading ability levels were trained in the three types of question answer relationships: text explicit, text implicit, and script implicit. Repeated measures multivariate analyses of variance on two passages indicated that the training enhanced students' understanding of task demands of questions and their answer quality.…

Offers a set of lesson plans that use simple semantic word maps to help students improve their vocabulary knowledge and comprehension in all subject areas. (FL)

Illustrates how social interaction with high quality literature can foster the literacy process of responding to literature with the student's own voice. Demonstrates ways that particular instructional processes can foster critical literacy processes as students share their interpretations of quality literature. (MG)

The primary question raised in two experiments was whether instructing fourth-grade students about different sources of information used when answering comprehension questions would enhance their performance on a comprehension test. The answer was yes. (HOD)

Examines fifth- and sixth-grade students' metacognitive knowledge about the processes of writing narrative and expository texts. Finds that creating a communicative context enhances students' awareness of audience and purpose, as well as their understanding of different aspects of the writing process. (MG)