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 Common Core State Standards and the continued inclusion of students with learning disabilities (LD) in Tier 1 classrooms are changing how close reading of texts occurs in English Language Arts classrooms. Therefore, understanding the potential impact of literacy-related evidence-based practices during Tier 1 instruction that includes students…

Story mapping is an effective visual strategy to enhance comprehension of narrative text in students, with or without disabilities. This article demonstrates how instruction can be designed using principles of universal design for learning with the evidence-based story-mapping strategy to improve reading comprehension for elementary students with…

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…

The authors, a ninth-grade teacher in a Special Education English class (Cheryl) and a teacher educator (Bucky), know of each other's work through a mutual interest in graphic novels. This article describes what happened in Cheryl's class when her students read "American Born Chinese" and discussed that text in a blog with its author, Gene Luen…

Ten children (aged between 7;11 and 9;2) with mixed reading disability participated in an oral narrative intervention programme that focused on enhancing children's story structure knowledge. The participants had all demonstrated persistent reading and oral narrative comprehension and production difficulties in a two-year longitudinal study prior…

Story structure instruction, focusing on forming a mental picture of a story's structure and understanding of story parts, improved poor-reading fourth-graders' (N=20) story writing skills in terms of organization and overall quality but not coherence and creativity, indicating that instruction in story parts can improve some children's writing.…

Mildly learning-handicapped elementary school students (N=5) with poor reading comprehension were trained to use story-mapping procedures to improve reading comprehension. Trained students demonstrated increased ability to answer comprehension questions, maintained performance after intervention, and increased the tendency to include story-mapping…

Describes a technique that combines the use of a story grammar strategy with cooperative learning procedures to promote greater reading comprehension. Step-by-step instructions for cooperative story mapping are provided, along with an illustration of a story map. The implications for special and remedial education are also discussed. (Author/CR)

A study was conducted to identify poor readers and to characterize weaknesses in their knowledge and use of story structure in comprehension and recall. Subjects were 80 year-3 children in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 20 good readers and 60 poor readers. The poor readers were then divided into relatively homogeneous subgroups, using measures…

To understand what kinds of mental processing take place during reading and how the child encodes information that is presented, a study investigated the comprehension of a story by asking the reader to take part actively in the decision-making of the protagonist. Subjects, 56 children from a fourth- and sixth-grade class at an elementary school…

This paper describes the Ball-Stick-Bird reading system, which shows students how all the letters of the alphabet can be built with three basic forms: a circle (ball), a line (stick), and an angle (bird). The method also uses modified phonics and developmental linguistics, aids story reading by using capital letters in the beginning, and enhances…

Examines the effects of exposures to children's literature through reading aloud and an inferencing strategy on low-reading-ability fifth-grade readers' sense of story structure and reading comprehension. Uses an experimental/control group repeated measures design. Finds that this study is consistent with other research that indicates the…

Investigates the effects of explicit story structure instruction on below-average fourth and fifth grade readers' narrative writing performance. Finds that explicit story structure instruction positively influenced the narrative writing performance in terms of both quality and quantity of their writing. (MG)