Although early reading instruction focuses on phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle, research indicates that reading comprehension strategies can be effectively taught to young students. Peer-reviewed studies that employed experimental or quasi-experimental designs and included children between the ages of five and nine, some of whom had…

The purpose of this multiple baseline study across participants was to examine a narrative retell intervention with guided self-monitoring on narrative macrostructure skills in low-income African American young children at risk for language disorders. Three target 4-year-old children in a mixed-age kindergarten class of nine students participated…

With the majority of students with learning disabilities (LD) having difficulties in reading, teachers at all grade levels need to incorporate comprehension strategies into their instruction to explicitly teach students with LD how to use the strategies to enhance their comprehension. One way for teachers to support students' comprehension of…

This thesis uses empirical research in order to understand effective strategies for successfully teaching of the expository essay to ninth grade students. Five focal areas are studied for targeted intervention in order to discover best practices for maximizing student learning of the essay format. The study hypothesizes that in order for ninth…

Metacognitive strategy instruction was used to teach two deaf children (ages 11 and 12) with differing American Sign Language and English language skills to summarize stories in writing. The instructional program used a knowledge of text structure--specifically story structure--to improve literacy skills by enhancing the children's ability to…

The study provided 7 dysphonetic and dyseidetic dyslexic children (aged 8 to 10) with instruction in reading comprehension using a story grammar strategy and instructional approaches matching each dyslexia subtype. Statistically and clinically significant improvements were found in the proportion of qualitatively important story elements recalled…

The study compared the effectiveness of providing elementary students with learning disabilities with either (1) instruction in both story structure and self-questioning techniques or (2) just training in story structure identification. The combined self-questioning and story structure group demonstrated the greatest gains in reading…

Twenty learning-disabled students (grades 5 and 6) who received procedural facilitation for narrative composition, including story grammar cue cards and a metacognitive check-off procedure, produced better quality stories than a control group of 10 students. Including verbal reminders to develop characters did not affect story quality. (Author/JDD)

Self-initiated repairs produced by 14 normal-language and 14 language-disordered children (ages 8-12) during a story retelling task are described. No group differences were found for grammatical repairs, text meaning repairs, or cohesive repairs relating to text meaning. Differences were significant for success of cohesive repair attempts and…

This introduction to Section 1, Part 2 of the theme issue discusses a study that investigated the story-grammar propositions of students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Results found that over 50% of the students could not produce the minimal components of a good story. The processes of story production are explained, including schemata…

A series of studies on 474 Colorado students (ages 7-18) with hearing impairments investigated the use of inference and elaboration, sequencing, and story-grammar strategies. The use of eight types of sequence/connection/cohesion strategies was examined. Results found that different strategies predominate depending on participants' age and degree…

This report describes a program implemented to improve reading comprehension in the content areas. The targeted population will consist of students in grades two, three, four, and five, in five midwestern schools, four public and one private. The problem of poor comprehension will be documented through test scores, parent and student surveys, and…

Within the framework of new study programs for Portuguese mandatory education, we carried out a research program at the school "Nossa Senhora do Rosario," under the coordination of this article's first author. Self-regulation of learning is the conceptual framework for the project, called "(Des)venturas do Testas"…

Presents the results of two studies where children were taught to identify textual cues, syntactic and semantic, in order to locate main ideas. The children also built graphic representations of these structures and were taught relevant questions to ask regarding comprehension. Results showed significant improvement, especially with older…