Background: Late secondary-level students (those in their final 2 years of secondary school) preparing for the demands of university and careers increasingly face texts written in academic language. Unfortunately, few intervention studies show how instruction can improve their reading achievement. Methods: The 152 student participants (16-17 years…

Integration of technology which includes the use of a smartphone is currently one of the trends in ESL writing classes. Particularly in collaborative activities, it is assumed that the use of smartphones contributes to the attitude of the learners towards writing and their writing performance as well. Consequently, the present study investigated…

The purpose of the study was to investigate differences in writers' abilities to perceive global text organisation in self-, peer- and teacher/researcher-authored essays. Eight student participants were identified as proficient, middle or developing, based on the levels of paragraph subordination, the average number of T-Units and the number of…

A study explored the question of the development of recall for narrative and informative texts. Subjects, 60 5th- 8th-, and 11th-grade students from a rural area of Quebec, representing all levels of achievement, were presented with an informative text and a narrative text. Results indicated that: (1) the narrative text elicited a longer recall…

Examines the differential effects of reading guides on text comprehension and the transfer of strategies learned through the use of the guides to new material. Finds that students using reading guides had higher comprehension test scores and greater transfer than those who did not. (SR)

Using a recursive network transition model for depicting stories to generate two stories of contrasting structure (successive episodes organized by topic and embedded episodes organized by failed and successful goals), a study examined the understanding of the structures by having children in the third through eleventh grades rate each story…

A study aimed to discover a correspondence between the thinking processes and textual structures of six eleventh graders. In a predominantly White, middle class rural high school, six students were selected to think aloud as they read two essays written as part of two assignments for their advanced English classes. The six were selected based on…

The goal of this study was to analyze the development of the relationship between conceptual and linguistic processes as regards idea ordering and structuring (linearizing), when composing a text. Participants (from 7th graders to University students) were required to compose a text using a list of eleven scrambled ideas. Conceptual rules allow to…

A qualitative study examined the ways in which middle school and high school students create meanings when they are reading literary and non-literary texts. Subjects, 18 seventh-grade and 18 eleventh-grade students attending schools in an inner city or a suburban school district and judged by their teachers to be either above, at, or below average…

Examines the effect of contrived instructional texts and naturally occurring texts (content area textbooks) on students' main idea comprehension. Concludes that students taught to identify the main idea using only contrived texts, such as basal skills lessons, will have difficulty transferring their main idea skills to naturally occurring texts.…

A study examined the poetic conventions of rhyme, meter, and diction to determine whether central tendencies and differences in evaluative response at various stages of late childhood and adolescence were discernible. Data were gathered from students of four grade levels (5, 7, 9, 11) enrolled in New York City public schools (359 students in all).…