Murai Tkato

This paper discusses the perspectives on the issue of critical reading instruction of expository text, analyzing journal articles (April 1995-March 2014). Through this analysis, I found that most critical reading instruction was focused on argumentation, especially "date". However, critical reading requires criticism of "warrant", and hence we need to instruct it. Moreover, I discussed the means of comprehension and criticism of "warrant".

In this paper, I examined the assessment of and instructions for critical reading in expository texts for first-year students at a junior high school. I examined tree points in the experimental practice: (a) the efficiency of using the new taxonomy as a critical reading framework; (b) setting the critical reading rubric to improve instruction and assessment; and (c) the effectiveness of the assessment method to improve reflective thinking as a target to consider a typical learner's reading feedback. By using a new taxonomy in experimental practice, it is important for the teacher to clearly distinguish the critical skill and disposition, to understand the learner's reading level for cognitive skill and meta-cognition. This process will help many learners to capture and evaluate the argument. Furthermore, with encouragement to provide feedback will support understanding to realize reflective reading.

In this manuscript, graduate students' multiple theses are compared. Furthermore, the study also investigates how reading research affects its linguistic understanding. In particular, the main targets of this study were textual linguistics studies; the development of sentence structure awareness research was temporally compared. First, the studies of Kazumi Tachikawa and Takashi Ichikawa were compared. The research content's development was ascertained and three perspectives were employed to gain a deeper understanding: (a) a focus on the introduction, comparison, and evaluation of prior research in the new theses; (b) a clarification of sections that follow from prior research and sections that were newly established with regard to the new theses' methodology, etc.; and (c) a focus on sections for which questions/criticisms are presented by the reader's existing knowledge regarding concepts that are handled in the new theses.Next, to understand the development of Tachikawa's study in other viewpoint, texts on sentence comprehension research in cognitive psychology were reviewed. Tachikawa's study was then considered from the three factors of sentence comprehension, the readers perspective, and the condition of reading. Therefore, the primary focus of Tachikawa's study was on the sentence factor, consistent with traditional linguistics, but could also be seen as addressing a readers perspective that had been clarified in sentence comprehension research. Furthermore, from the viewpoint of sentence comprehension research, significance of Tachikawa's study can also be seen as supplementing the sentence approach.Thus, a comparative thesis reading from the perspectives shown above led to a deeper understanding of the key concepts involved in ascertaining the positioning of Tachikawa's study. The elucidation of these learning processes will be useful for schoolteachers as they research materials to clarify learning processes through the reading of theses in specialist areas, in addition to pursuing the ideals for teaching support.

This paper discusses various perspectives on the issue of critical reading instruction of expository text, examining six representative instruction theories. I construct the concept of "critical" frameworks by classifying critical thinking and critical education in a discussion of instruction theories. This framework is constructed by three components: the goal of critical reading; the target of critical reading; the content of teaching. In this framework, the goals of critical reading are "analytical" or "innovative". The target of critical reading has four elements; argument, figure of speech, background, and ideology. The content of teaching has two elements; "reason" and "reflection". Examination of six instruction theories revealed three types; (a) analytical and reasonable instruction, (b) analytical instruction involving reflection, and (c) innovative and reflective instruction. Type (a) is considered problematic in previous critical thinking research. Type (b) addresses the problems of type (a). In addition, type (c) incorporates social connectivity. Thus, I propose that it would be valuable for perspectives of critical reading instruction of expository text to further develop type (b) and type (c).

The text that students have once read during their classes are often used in summative assessment of reading expository text. In this paper, I investigated factors of continuing the summative assessment by interview with junior high school teachers and considered the solution of the assessment issue in reading instruction of expository texts. As the result of this investigate, I found four main factors: (1) difficult of teacher's immature view of reading ability and assessment, (2) belief that student and their parents don't understand the new assessment, (3) dilemma that colleague maintain previous method, (4) difficult of absence of new method in assessing reading expository text. Above all, study of reading instruction of expository texts is needed to approach (4) difficult of absence of new method. Also, the approach is needed to focus on critical reading.