The increasingly integrative use of images with language in many different types of texts in electronic and paper media has created an urgent need to go beyond logocentric accounts of literacy and literacy pedagogy. Correspondingly there is a need to augment the genre, grammar and discourse descriptions of verbal text as resources for literacy pedagogy to include descriptions of the meaning-mak...

Understanding the neural processes that underlie learning to read can provide a scientific foundation for literacy education but studying these processes in real-world contexts remains challenging. We present behavioural data from adult participants learning to read artificial words and name artificial objects over two days. Learning profiles and generalisation confirmed that componential learn...

Statistical summaries permeate our everyday lives, showing up in magazines (results of reader surveys), news reports (about everything from elections and health care to water quality and global warming), in the sports pages of newspapers (the myriad of baseball “stats”), and bank statements and credit reports. News and entertainment media as well as educational media providers (whether book pub...

Civic literacy is an area of the field of literacy’s that libraries should develop. In Portugal, in the Seixal Municipal Library, we have also focused, for several years, on the development of textual literacy and other specific literacy’s (as is the case of digital, media, visual and historic literacy’s). In 2007, we started a program of literacy for citizenship, “Rights for Right?” (“Direitos...

Much research on literacy development has focused on learners of alphabetic writing systems. Researchers have hypothesized that children learn about the formal characteristics of writing before they learn about the relations between units of writing and units of speech. We tested this hypothesis by examining young Chinese children's understanding of writing. Mandarin-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds ...

Objective Most electronic health record systems provide laboratory test results to patients in table format. We tested whether presenting such results in visual displays (number lines) could improve understanding. Materials and Methods We presented 1620 adults recruited from a demographically diverse Internet panel with hypothetical results from several common laboratory tests, first showing ...