Any curriculum consists of several components: goals, disposition, duration, needs analysis, learners and teachers, exercises and activities, resources, ways of learning, skills to be acquired, lexis, language structure, and ability assessment. Before setting up a program or course of study, these components should be determined and described in…

This review of literature presents research about young children's (ages 2-8) early experiences with comprehension. Using a theoretical framework for emergent comprehension, the review demonstrates how each research study contributes to a holistic theory of emergent comprehension. Influences on emergent comprehension such as children's…

In this review of literature we examine empirical research of individual differences in younger readers' knowledge and use of expository text structures. The goal of this review is to explore the influence of reader and text characteristics in order to better understand the instructional needs of elementary school readers. First we review research…

Patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy from hippocampal origin and patients with unilateral surgical excision of an epileptic focus located in the medial temporal lobe were compared to healthy controls on a version of the Autobiographical Interview (AI) adapted to assess memory for event-specific and generic personal episodes. For both…

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…

This research explores the impact of flashbacks and changes in settings and narrators on reader comprehension. Individually, 34 fourth graders (9 and 10 years of age), mostly with above average reading abilities (5.0), orally read the first chapter of a novel. Both publisher and readability formulae estimated the text to be at a fourth- grade…

This paper presents an approach for preparing children to experience a theatrical performance, "theatre semiotics preparation." This programme introduces children to the specific elements of the theatrical performance (music, props, costumes, etc.). In the study we compare the efficacy of this new programme with that of traditional…

This article comes from a speech that Richard Peck gave at the Colorado Language Arts Society Regional Spring Conference in 2007. At our request, he prepared this excerpt for "English Journal" readers.

The importance of emergent literacy skills as a foundation for proficient reading has led to the development of interventions to teach these skills. These interventions are particularly important for children from disadvantaged homes because they often lack the home literacy experiences necessary for building foundational literacy skills prior to…

Composing text is an essential skill for students. Assignments, tests, and emailing are a few examples of the many tasks which require students to generate thoughts and put them into prose. For many students, choosing a topic, creating an outline, generating an initial draft, and making edits to produce a final copy is a fluid process which poses…

Organizational culture is the personality of the organization: the beliefs, values, and behavioral norms of an organization. People come and go and a strong organizational culture guides their thinking and behavior while they are there. Good centers, like all good organizations, have cultures that shape how its members think, feel, and behave.…

Storyboards deliver a narrative through discrete visual representations. The purpose of the storyboards was always to "scaffold" the final product and students were free to add, delete, or adapt those images that were most helpful to their project. The storyboards served as a brainstorming activity, much like a prewriting exercise for a written…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of using a story-mapping procedure to improve and enhance the reading comprehension skills using expository text passages for 3 fourth-grade students with learning disabilities (LD). The study was conducted in the resource classroom in which the participants regularly received reading…

Metadiscourse is a new and interesting field of inquiry which is believed to play a vital role in organizing and producing persuasive writing, based on the norms and expectations of people involved. Metadiscourse embodies the idea that writing and speaking are more than just the communication of ideas and presentation of ideational meaning. Rather…

It is argued that tasks with different structures yield different performances in terms of accuracy, fluency and complexity. The present study is thus an attempt to investigate the impact of task structure on second language task performance. Thirty two upper-intermediate Iranian learners of English performed two narrative tasks (Structured vs.…