This article reviews theoretical and research evidence to support the explicit and systematic teaching of five comprehension strategies that will help all students tackle expository texts with success. The article explains the "High 5!" strategies and how to teach them. An example of a lesson is included to show how the five strategies connect…

The role of grammatical knowledge in inferencing word meaning has not received proper attention in L2 research. Addressing this issue, the present paper provides research-based and introspective think-aloud data to examine the contribution of grammatical knowledge to inferencing the meaning of unknown words. It addresses (a) the effects of…

This study extended the work of S. Siddiqui, R. F. West, and K. E. Stanovich (1998), who studied the link between general print exposure and syllogistic reasoning. It was hypothesized that exposure to certain text structures that contain well-delineated logical forms, such as popularized scientific texts, would be a better predictor of deductive…

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.…

Two experiments investigated the role of text coherence in junior high school students' comprehension of science texts. Found that text coherence improved readers' comprehension, but also that giving readers with sufficient background knowledge an incoherent text that forced them to infer unstated relations engaged them in compensatory processing,…