Reading, thinking, and concept development: Strategies for the classroom

Intended to help teachers both improve students' text comprehension and better understand the teaching-learning process involved, this book focuses on comprehension and concept development as the central core of an effective educational program. The book's five sections deal with teaching explicit comprehension skills, precomprehension and postcomprehension strategies, interactive comprehension strategies, integrative comprehension strategies, and readability and the future of the textbook. The titles of the 15 essays and their authors are as follows: (1) "'Teaching' Comprehension," by P. David Pearson and Margie Leys; (2) "How to Teach Readers to Find the Main Idea," by Joanna P. Williams; (3) "Developing Comprehension of Anaphoric Relationships," by Dale D. Johnson; (4)"Knowledge and Comprehension: Helping Students Use What They Know," by Judith A. Langer and Victoria Purcell-Gates; (5) "The Advance Organizer: Its Nature and Use," by Robert W. Jerrolds; (6) "Anticipation and Prediction in Reading Comprehension," by Joan Nelson-Herber; (7) "Response Instruction," by Beau Fly Jones; (8) "Using Classroom Dialogues and Guided Practice to Teach Comprehension Strategies," by Scott G. Paris; (9) "Reciprocal Teaching: Activities to Promote Reading with Your Mind," by Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and Ann L. Brown; (10) "Using Children's Concept of Story to Improve Reading and Writing," by Dorothy S. Strickland and Joan T. Feeley; (11) "Integration of Content and Skills Instruction," by Olive S. Niles; (12) "Levels of Comprehension: An Instructional Strategy for Guiding Students' Reading," by Harold L. Herber; (13) "Thinking About Reading," by Susan Sardy; (14) "Matching Reading Materials to Readers: The Role of Readability Estimates in Conjunction with Other Information about Comprehensibility," by George Klare; and (15) "Textbook Adoptions: A Process for Change," by Jean Osborn and Marcy Stein. (HTH)