Personalizing text is known to support learning from text. The present study extends evidence of the personalization effect by investigating whether elementary school students' reading comprehension benefits from reading narratives personalized by using the reader's name for the narrative's protagonist. Additionally, this study examined the…

This article describes research on the Harbor Us Book Club. Critical analysis of the reading responses from preteen Black youth remains surprisingly rare in literacy studies. Our inquiry asks: How do readers develop literary and lived understandings of selfhood in response to the books? In what follows, we describe the theoretical frameworks and…

The current set of experiments was designed to explore the processing of spatial information during reading, specifically the "spatial-shift" effect and the "spatial-gradient" effect. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that when participants were presented with text alone (i.e., without prior map memorization, virtual…

Most children across the world learn to read and write in non-alphabetic orthographies such as abjads (e.g., Arabic), abugidas (e.g., Ethiopic Ge'ez), and morphosyllabaries (e.g., Chinese). However, most theories of reading, reading development, and dyslexia derive from a relatively narrow empirical base of research in English--an outlier…

While previous research has suggested there are dominantly two reading practices in critical literacy, namely, reading with and against texts, this study introduces the approach of ambivalence as a third way of reading texts critically. For the purpose of this study -- establishing ambivalence as a reading practice in critical literacy -- four…

Irony is a heavily context-dependent pragmatic phenomenon. But what is it about context that facilitates or blocks irony comprehension? Based on the echoic account, we suggest that a context facilitates irony comprehension when it makes manifest a speaker's intentions and attitude, i.e., when a context makes it easy for participants to engage…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore teacher candidates' response to young adult literature (prose and comics) featuring fat identified protagonists. The paper considers the textual and embodied resources readers use and reject when imagining and interpreting a character's body. This paper explores how readers' meaning making was…

Removing interword spacing has been shown to disrupt lower-level oculomotor processes and word identification during text reading. However, the impact of these disruptions on higher-level processes remains unclear. To examine the influence of spacing on inferential processing, we monitored eye movements while participants read spaced and unspaced…

This study investigates how Chinese American children construct their identities in self-created multimodal discourses. Drawing from multimodal discourse and critical visual literacy, the research analyzes multimodal discourses created by eight Chinese American children, including the illustrations, texts, and oral explanations. The findings…

This article presents findings from a qualitative content analysis of 531 Little Golden Books that contain early childhood marginalia--any physical alteration of a book, resulting from an exercise of reader agency by a child from birth through eight years old. The primary goals of the present study were to expand the reach of this methodology by…

We report a study examining, for the first time, the effectiveness of engagement in dialogic argumentation in relation to its ability to promote integration of multiple source perspectives in an argumentive writing task after reading controversial multiple texts. Sixty-four primary school students engaged in a dialog-based intervention aiming to…

This collaborative, single-case study explores the ways a social studies teacher candidate conceptualizes and applies disciplinary literacy (DL) teaching in practicum and student teaching experiences. Through qualitative inquiry of data collected at multiple points in the teacher education program, DL teaching was represented across six themes:…

In a rapidly changing information landscape, science communicators need to find new ways to engage audiences, make their information memorable and increase attitudes towards scientists. Evidence suggests that stories could be an effective tool for these goals, but few studies tested experimentally whether they are advantageous to non-stories in…

This article explores the role of text and reader characteristics in character engagement experiences. In an online study, participants completed several self-report and behavioral measures of social-cognitive abilities and read two literary narratives in which the presence of linguistic viewpoint markers was varied using a highly controlled…

Background: Although comprehending illustrated texts is essential, adult readers in this era may not have acquired reading comprehension strategies. Eye-movement modelling example (EMME) is promising for helping less-skilled learners master these strategies; however, its benefits for adults remain unknown. Another understudied factor in the EMME…