PURPOSE As children develop skills in writing across academic contexts, clinicians and educators need to have a fundamental understanding of typical writing development as well as valid and reliable assessment methods. The purpose of this study was to examine the progression of linguistic elements in school-age children's narrative and expository writing development. METHOD Narrative and expo...

PURPOSE This research investigated the expository language skills of young school-age children with the ultimate aim of obtaining normative data for clinical practice. Specifically, this study examined (a) the level of expository language performance of 6- and 7-year-old children with typical development and (b) age-related differences between young and older school-age children. METHOD Expos...

This study examined whether children’s reading rate, comprehension, and recall are affected by computer presentation of text. Participants were 60 grade five students, who each read two expository texts, one in a traditional print format and the other from a computer monitor, which used a common scrolling text interface. After reading each text, participants were asked to recall as much as they...

The author examined memory for text in terms of the independent influences of semantic knowledge associations and text organization. Semantic associations were operationalized as the semantic relatedness between individual text concepts and the text as a whole and assessed with latent semantic analysis. The author assessed text organization by simulating comprehension with the construction inte...

In this article, we will describe what text structure is and discuss its importance for reading comprehension. Then we will detail a method of teaching students to follow text structures as a content reading strategy. First, we will review research that suggests that the way in which text is organized and readers’ knowledge about text structure affect how much will be remembered after reading. ...

This study was an attempt to integrate motivation into reading comprehension, with active knowledge construction as a linkage. The study examined two motivational constructs, need for cognition and reader’s beliefs, in terms of their role in text comprehension and interest development. The results of the study provided empirical evidence for the independent contributions of the two variables to...

The current article was an attempt to investigate the effect of semantic mapping strategy instruction on reading comprehension performance of EFL learners. To this end, thirty homogeneous Iranian intermediate EFL learners attending a language school in Bonab, Iran, were randomly assigned to two groups, one as the experimental and the other as the control. The experimental group received instruc...