Reading - From Words to Multiple Texts

Increasing the mastery of reading and text literacy in the general population is one of the most important challenges faced by both developed and developing societies. Providing a new reference for researchers and practitioners involved in this domain, this book brings together empirical research on the multiple levels of language that are involved in reading. It emphasizes the concrete outcomes of scientific research, and illustrates the continuity among levels. The chapters deal with clearly articulated questions, provide up-to-date reviews of the literature, and include discussions of the impacts of research outcomes for the practice of reading instruction. Furthermore, the volume addresses the gap between restricted and more functional approaches to reading competency. Finally, it addresses some of the new issues that arise from the rapid changes in reading practices that are related to the diffusion of digital technologies. Featuring contributions from authors who are among the acknowledged leaders in the field and presenting the state of the art and current controversies in reading and literacy research, this volume honors the profound impact of Charles Perfetti on reading research.

M. Anne Britt is a Professor in the Psychology Department at Northern Illinois University. Susan R. Goldman is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Psychology, and Education and Co-Director of the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Jean-François Rouet is Senior Research Scientist with the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research).

Preface 1. Reading is recycling-it's human nature 2. Learning to read words: Understanding the relationship between reading ability, lexical quality, and reading context 3. Reading acquisition in a transparent orthography: The case of Dutch 4. Teachers in the Know: Links between Teachers' Phonological Knowledge and Students' Literacy Learning 5. Why it is easier to wreak havoc than unleash havoc: The role of lexical co-occurrence, predictability and reading proficiency in sentence reading 6. What kind of language statistics must be in long-term memory to make language understanding possible: A computational perspective 7. Making the link between vocabulary knowledge and comprehension skill 8. From Verbal Efficiency Theory to Lexical Quality: The Role of Memory Processes in Reading Comprehension 9. Sensitivity to Structural Centrality: Developmental and individual differences in reading comprehension skills 10. Identifying component discourse processes from their fMRI time course signatures 11. Documents as entities: Extending the situation model theory of comprehension 12. Research and Development of Multiple Source Comprehension Assessment 13. From Decoding to Documents: The Complex Components of Comprehending Reading Index