A substantial amount of research has focused on children's reading development and reading problems, but in comparison there has been relatively little research into children's reading comprehension. This article provides an overview of the research that has investigated the skills and cognitive processes that support children's understanding of…

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…

A focus of the Common Core State Standards/English Language Arts (CCSS/ELA) is that students become increasingly more capable with complex text over their school careers. This focus has redirected attention to the measurement of text complexity. Although CCSS/ELA suggests multiple criteria for this task, the standards offer a single measure of…

Examines the process of review as a method of formative evaluation of texts. Bases the description on three empirical studies of professional writing practices including the goals of review, the actors involved in the process, the moments in the text production process that review is taking place, and the procedures followed. (SG)

Investigates two types of texts (a reading scheme book and a children's literature text) to see how the reader is constructed by the text, and what kind of reading support is offered. Finds that the literary text offers more reading support than the supposedly carefully constructed reading scheme book, which constructs a passive reader to whom…

A study examined the opportunities provided by several types of text for beginning readers to learn about three aspects of written English: (1) consistent, common letter-sound patterns; (2) the most frequent words; and (3) the contexts of sentences and texts. Results indicate that texts based on high-frequency words give beginning readers ample…

Suggests picture books are made more difficult for kids to predict, to make sense of, and to learn from by fitting them into the didactic framework of basals. Discusses the picture book genre. Compares the original version of "Ira Sleeps Over" to the basal version. Examines in detail how picture books are made to fit into a basal…

A study examined 52 stories for grades 1-6, randomly chosen from 10 American and Canadian literature-based reading series containing well-known selections by well-known authors. The study compared the reading series selection to the original story cited in the series acknowledgments, seeking patterns of difference in wording, paragraph structure,…

Reviews multidisciplinary research on second culture and second language reading comprehension to support the claim that second language reading is an interactive process, involving the interrelationship of cultural schemata and discourse structure. Argues for the roles of cultural schemata and discourse structure in an interactive model of first…