BOOKS BY GABRIELLA AGRUSTI

Gabriella Agrusti It is widely recognized that prior knowledge plays a fundamental role in reading comprehension and in meaning construction. Generally, readers who are able to identify the typical structure of a text in a genre or to locate its content within the appropriate domain are said to better recall the ideas conveyed by the text. The text itself is a textus, a complex texture that includes rhetorical patterns on different directories (spatial, temporal, figurative), a network structure that offers several ways of integrating information based on relationships among its components. Poor readers are unlikely to make inferences to link these pieces of information into a coherent representation. Would the introduction of an image comprehension strategy improve students’ reading comprehension of verbal texts? In this article the results of a research project carried out in Italy on adult readers, with particular reference to inferential processes in narrative anachronies, will be presented.

Distance learning in Italy is currently widespread both in terms of course numbers and participants. From the end of the 1980s the Laboratorio di Pedagogia sperimentale (Roma Tre University) offered ongoing distance 131 learning courses and on line postgraduate courses for teachers and individuals engaged in cultural activities. This article considers this twenty-year experience setting out courses features, their evolution over the years, the different types of student and the introduction of new technologies on interactive teaching. It will also aim at demonstrating the most recent lines of research on adaptive learning. Distance education, teacher training, technologies in education, Italy, adaptive learning.