Wrap-up effects in reading have traditionally been thought to reflect increased processing associated with intra- and inter-clause integration (Just, M. A. & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). A theory of reading: From eye fixations to comprehension. "Psychological Review, 87"(4), 329-354; Rayner, K., Kambe, G., & Duffy, S. A. (2000). The effect of clause…

This study investigated the impact of an Internet based program designed to improve basic writing skills on grammar and punctuation scores on an English Competency Test. Three groups in a small Midwestern university's freshmen composition class were tested: a control group (Test Group 1), which did not use the program; and two treatment groups:…

This study examined different perspectives of deaf education practitioners on deafness and reading comprehension. This involved a full deaf education support team comprising teachers of the deaf, communication support workers, and deaf instructors from a UK citywide service covering early years, primary and secondary settings. Using a focus group…

The present study looked at how children establish a relationship between the conceptual and linguistic dimensions of linearization in descriptive text composition. Written productions were compared with oral ones. French-speaking participants, drawn from the fifth, seventh, and ninth grades, produced both a written and an oral description of a…

This experimental project investigated the reliability and validity of rubrics in assessment of students' written responses to a social science "writing prompt". The participants were asked to grade one of the two samples of writing assuming it was written by a graduate student. In fact both samples were prepared by the authors. The…

Recent research in the area of Curriculum-Based Measures (CBM) in writing has shown that traditionally used metrics, such as total words written and total words correct, may not be the best tools for measuring writing performance, for both secondary and elementary aged children (e.g., Gansle, Noell, VanDerHeyden, Naquin, & Slider, 2002; Tindal…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the story writing skills of adults with a history of oral language impairment. It was hypothesized that writing text would pose difficulty for adults with a history of language impairment (LI), and that this difficulty would manifest itself as reduced grammatical complexity and increased errors in…

As teachers plan instruction--even instruction about punctuation--they have the opportunity to engage students' minds and create new labels: question-asking, problem-solving. How teachers teach embeds a vision of who they think kids are and what they think kids are capable of. Are they destined for a future of critical thinking, questioning,…

In this article, the author offers her experience of modeling mistakes and writing spontaneously in the computer classroom to get students' attention and elicit their editorial response. She describes how she taught her class about major sentence errors--comma splices, run-ons, and fragments--through her Sentence Meditation exercise, a rendition…

Twenty-three kindergarten and first grade children were asked to articulate the meaning and the need for punctuation marks in a list of numerals showing prices for a list of items. Despite not having been schooled yet formally on the use and roles of numerical punctuation, many children gave similar explanations regarding the purpose of…

This study aims to determine the effect/contribution of the use of the jigsaw technique in the teaching of punctuation marks in mother tongue education on/to the academic improvement of students. The functionality of reading, speaking and writing skills falling within the understanding and expression domains of learning is dependent upon the…

Heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian in the United States form a very complex and diverse group of learners. Research in heritage linguistics has examined key parameters of the HSs' oral production. Important work has been done in heritage language (HL) pragmatics, morphology, and lexicon. However, very few studies have been conducted to…

The aim of this paper is to present a concise coherent literature review of the Arabic Language script system as one of the oldest living Semitic languages in the world. The article discusses in depth firstly, Arabic script as a phonemic sound-based writing system of twenty eight, right to left cursive script where letterforms shaped by their…

Extensive research indicates that there are more boys than girls who are struggling readers, although considerable variation in gender ratios has been reported as a result of a lack of consensus in defining and measuring poor reading. The purpose of this study was to establish stable and consistent gender ratios for poor reading using a single…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether technically adequate curriculum-based measures of writing could be identified for use with high school students. The participants included 10th-grade general and special education students from two public school districts in Wisconsin. Students (n = 82) completed two narrative writing samples in…