Engaging college students in purposeful academic tasks designed to foster both reading and writing competencies requires calculated decision-making regarding the goals and benefits of the literacy tasks used in college courses. Consequently, we explore text reformulation as a literacy strategy that aims to enrich students' reading and writing…

Once upon a time, nonfiction books for children routinely included concise, stodgy writing. Most of the books were text heavy, with just a few scattered images decorating, rather than enhancing, the content and meaning. But nonfiction has changed dramatically over the last two decades, evolving into a new breed of visually dynamic, engaging texts…

Writing argumentative texts is a hallmark of literacy attainments with a long and laborious trajectory. The present study explored the incipient stages in argumentative texts written by 293 Hebrew-speaking Israeli children in second, third, fourth, and fifth grades. The literacy cognitive, transcriptional, linguistic, and reading abilities were…

This study was conducted in the province of Québec, Canada, among French-speaking Grade 6 students (n = 175) in the context of a school curriculum that does not clearly address text structure and main idea instruction. It aims to understand whether these students can identify informative text structures and main ideas in isolated paragraphs,…

Learning to compose texts adequate for different purposes is crucial for becoming literate. We examined developmental changes in the rhetorical structure of written texts produced by Spanish children throughout the early years of elementary school in the light of descriptive writing purposes. Children had also performed tasks to test…

The aim of this study is to investigate the perception levels of the messages of didactic fiction texts in fictive context and the student's perception levels of these messages. 80 students attending the grades of 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th--20 from each grade--are randomly selected as participants. Under the supervision of specialists, six fictive…

In this article, the authors situate their discussion of diverse narrative structures in the context of oral storytelling practices and postmodern picturebooks. They focus on three contemporary picturebooks: "Don't Read This Book!" (Lewis, 2009), "Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek: A Tall Thin Tale" (Hopkins, 2008), and "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other…

The aim of this study is to investigate the perception levels of the messages of didactic fiction texts in fictive context and the student's perception levels of these messages. 80 students attending the grades of 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th 20 from each grade, are randomly selected as participants. Under the supervision of specialists, six fictive…

This study examined whether the graphemic structure of words modulates the timing of handwriting production during the acquisition of writing skills. This is particularly important during the acquisition period because phonological recoding skills are determinant in the elaboration of orthographic representations. First graders wrote seven-letter…

Drawing from various current grammar systems, this text provides a practical and easy-to-understand handbook of grammar for readers of expository prose (language written for explanation and read for understanding). The analysis in the book is designed to perform two functions: (1) help readers receive with clarity, if at all possible, the…

Investigates the effectiveness of study guides (called Expository Passage Organizers) in improving sixth graders' reading and writing. Finds that such study guides, which highlighted the structures of textbooks, made a significant and positive difference in reading and writing performance. (SR)

Examines the relationship between children's reading performance and their use of cohesion in writing. Finds that good readers achieved significantly more complex cohesive harmony in their writing than poor readers, who made significantly more inappropriate use of cohesive devices. Concludes that knowledge of cohesion is related to children's…

Six instructional design principles are recommended to enable students with learning disabilities to comprehend and compose expository materials. The instructional principles are illustrated using the compare/contrast text structure. Charts provide examples and clarification of the strategies. (SW)

A study investigated how students' mental representation of an expository text and the inferences they used in summarizing varied as a function of text difficulty and of differences in the task. Subjects, 96 college students and students from grades 6 and 10, wrote summaries of expository texts and answered orally several probe questions about the…