摘要： Earth's ancient flora comes to life in a vivid romp through 15 fossil sites.

关键词： Comprehension strategy   comprehension training   explicit training   first grade   pronouns  

摘要： Pronoun comprehension is widely recognized as an essential tool for both oral and reading comprehension. For beginning readers, however, interpreting pronominal expressions can be particularly challenging. Explicit training in the comprehension skills needed to interpret pronouns has been shown to be helpful for children in grades 3-5, but has never been shown to be helpful in lower grades. The purpose of this study was to determine whether explicit training in pronoun interpretation could be beneficial for the skill being trained as early as 1st grade, and whether this positive effect generalizes to broader comprehension skills. A pretest-training-posttest protocol was set up with 153 French 1st-graders who were divided into two groups: an experimental group that received explicit training in pronoun interpretation and an active control group whose training focused on global comprehension of narrative text without a focus on pronoun interpretation. Results show that explicit pronoun interpretation training was more effective than global comprehension training in improving students' ability to interpret pronouns, and that the two types of training produced equivalent gains in overall comprehension. This study demonstrates for the first time that it is possible to train and improve 1st-graders' pronoun interpretation skills using an explicit approach.