Syntax, or sentence structure, plays a role in reading comprehension, but how students draw on their awareness of syntax in their reading remains unclear; the mechanism is even more ambiguous in bilingual students. In this study, we evaluated the direct and indirect contributions of syntactic awareness on first-language Chinese and second-language…

Purpose: This study examined language group differences in English syntactic knowledge based on performance on a sentence repetition task. Method: Fourth and sixth grade students who were monolinguals (n = 30), early bilinguals (i.e., simultaneous; n = 27), or late bilinguals (i.e., sequential; n = 29) completed an English sentence repetition…

In the face of immense pressure from Spanish, the national language, a group of educators in Michoacán are committed to prioritising P'urhepecha in two local primary schools where P'urhepecha is the dominant community language. The history of educational initiatives among the P'urhepecha people illustrates the inconsistent and primarily…

Two studies examined the role of input distribution in English construction learning, by child learners from a Mandarin first-language background, and the extent to which phonological short-term memory and awareness predicted such learning. In the first study, 4th-grade students of Mandarin Chinese (N = 121) learned the English object-cleft…

Children in grades one to four completed two sentence construction tasks: (a) Write one complete sentence about a topic prompt (sentence integrity, Study 1); and (b) Integrate two sentences into one complete sentence without changing meaning (sentence combining, Study 2). Most, but not all, children in first through fourth grade could write just…

This paper outlines a case study conducted in two public schools in the greater Toronto area as a complementary component of a multisite experimental study exploring educational game development as a learning activity for motivating and engaging students in curriculum-related literacy activities (Owston et al., 2007). Researchers studied children…

Reports on research designed to determine the development in comprehension of selected pronoun-referent structures. Some of the conclusions were that noun phrase pronominal structures were easier to comprehend than sentential pronominals and that structures with forward reference were easier to comprehend than those with backward reference. (MKM)

A study investigated the separate and combined effects of the syntactic organization of the sentence, the contextual framework in which a message is embedded, and the readers' past experiences on children's inferential reading comprehension of pragmatic cause/effect statements. The subjects, 144 fourth grade students, were asked to specify the…

A study was conducted to determine the relationship between processing load and ability to locate text segments containing intersentence contradictions. It was hypothesized that less able readers fail to exhibit comprehension monitoring skills because most tasks overload their processing capacity. Subjects were 87 fourth and sixth grade students…

Children from non-English-speaking homes are doubly disadvantaged when learning English in school. They enter school with less prior knowledge of English sounds, word meanings, and sentence structure, and they get little or no reinforcement of their learning outside of the classroom. This article compares the classroom standard practice of…

A study examined the existence in elementary school children of (1) sentence constructivity, (2) developmental differences in constructivity, (3) differences in constructivity across performance levels, and (4) differences after a one- or two-day delay. The study was intended as a partial replication of work by C. Z. Blachowicz (1977-78), which…

Supplementary to "NAEP 1996 Trends in Academic Progress," this report describes two aspects of writing for which change has been measured since 1984: writing fluency as determined by holistic scoring; and mastery of the conventions of written English as determined by mechanics scoring. The introduction discusses the layout and means of…

A coding scheme developed by M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan was used in a study that investigated how students in grades 4, 6, and 8 developed meaning within narrative texts. Students, after being presented with a visual stimulus, were asked to describe what was happening and say what happened before and after the picture. Next, an oral assignment…