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Note added at 1 hr (2011-04-22 09:38:25 GMT)
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DEVELOPING SECOND AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE READING FLUENCY AND
ITS EFFECT ON COMPREHENSION: A MISSING LINK http://www.readingmatrix.com/articles/taguchi_gorsuch_sasamo...

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Note added at 1 hr (2011-04-22 09:39:31 GMT)
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In a larger scope, Pikulski and Chard (2005) have stated that fluency is the “missing link” between decoding words and reading comprehension. A common problem with learning readers is that they struggle to make the jump between reading words in a........
http://msit.gsu.edu/Readingconsortium/Literacylens/html/Tidw...

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Note added at 1 hr (2011-04-22 09:40:15 GMT)
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Consensus is building among researchers that vocabulary is the missing link in reading education. Many children enter school 3,000-4,000 words behind their peers. By fifth grade this vocabulary gap has turned into a five-year deficit in reading comprehension.

I would use 'rupture' here - it is often used in a semiological context and certainly in visual analysis. Something occurs or is indicated which causes meaning to be other than straightforward, or the meaning is somehow undermined or brought into question.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2Zw_21gKz1QC&pg=PA39&lpg=...

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=E5zCts8ax58C&pg=PA59&lpg=...

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Note added at 56 mins (2011-04-22 09:31:02 GMT)
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The original meaning is not likely to be lost, as such, it probably becomes multi-layered or subverted, but not lost. Much of the irony in post-modern art relates to the knowing nod to supposed simpler, earlier meanings, whilst at the same time complicating them.

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Note added at 9 hrs (2011-04-22 17:50:19 GMT)
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Michel Foucault (1926-1984) always insisted that he was not a poststructuralist critic but rather a genealogist. But his analysis of discourse owes a lot to Saussure's insights about the construction of meaning. Foucault shows how discourses regulate what can be said, what can be thought, and what is considered true or correct. So the pre-modern medical theories based on bodily humors constructed a particular understanding of the body, and within that discourse, certain things were true and false. However, there were many other propositions that were neither true nor false but fell outside the discursive system altogether. Anyone who tried to think outside the system would not have been respected or accorded a voice in the conversation about bodies. Discourse is thus the medium through which power is expressed and people and practices are governed; academic disciplines discipline. Foucault also argued that "the history of thought" is a misnomer, as it implied a continuous evoltion of ideas. Rather, he used the terms genealogy or archeology of knowledge, focusing on the ruptures or breaks between one era's discourse and another's.

Thomas Kuhn's (1922-1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; he wrote it as a grad student) makes the kind of argument about scientific thought that Foucault made about discourses in general (and in particular). Kuhn used the term paradigm to describe the foucauldian discourses that regulate scientific thought. For Kuhn, science is not an evolutionary, progressive march towards greater and greater truth but rather "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions" (Foucault's "ruptures") in which one point of view is replaced by another. (Think of the difference between the Ptolomaic and Newtonian worlds.) So science's claim to truth is highly questionable and even ephemeral; since the truths of past science have passed away, we can be certain that what science claims today will itself one day be superseded by the claims of a new paradigm, which will itself one day be superseded . . . .

http://www.ic.arizona.edu/ic/mcbride/theory/305struct.htm

See for instance http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499s99/yamauchi/semantic.htm