Background/purpose: Academic reading presents significant challenges for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) learners, especially when processing structurally dense expository texts in STEM disciplines. This study aims to assess the impact of text-structure-aligned goals on students' reading comprehension and written summarization, while exploring…

The benefits of peer facilitation on the development of students' skills in various fields have been widely discussed. However, we know very little about how teachers could draw on peer facilitation to improve pedagogical designs. This study aimed to investigate the influence of peer facilitation carried out in a tertiary EFL (English as a Foreign…

Online learning is becoming more and more pervasive in higher education institutions. According to the Sloan-C report (All & Seaman, 2006) more than 3.5 million students are enrolled in online courses in the United States. That number represents a 9.7 % increase over the previous year, which far exceeds the 1.5 % growth rate for higher…

As long as students use Web 2.0 tools extensively for social purposes, there is an opportunity to improve students' engagement in Higher Education by using these tools for academic purposes under a Personal Learning Environment approach (PLE 2.0). The success of these attempts depends upon the reactions and acceptance of users towards e-learning…

Research on how individuals monitor their level of comprehension during study paints a picture of learners as being insensitive to many of the factors or conditions of learning that can enhance long-term retention and transfer. In previous research, however, deWinstanley and Bjork (2004) demonstrated that learners--if made sensitive to the…

While multitasking is not a new concept, it has received increasing attention in recent years with the development of new media and technologies. Recent trends appear to suggest that multitasking is on the rise among the younger generation. The purpose of the study is to determine if students obtain more or less information in multitasking…

As digital devices play a more critical role in daily life than ever, more opportunities arise for innovative learning technologies--a trend on full display in the "Educational Media and Technology Yearbook" for 2013. This latest edition from the Association for Education, Communication, and Technology (AECT) notes the most current…

This study aims at arousing college students' metacognition in detecting lexical cohesion during online text construction as WordNet served as a lexical resource. A total of 83 students were requested to construct texts through sequences of actions identified as interaction chains in this study. Interaction chains are grouped and categorized as a…

The study involving 82 hearing and 78 hearing impaired undergraduates was undertaken to test the hypothesis that hearing impaired Ss would cluster prepositions into different sentence groups when operating from scrambled story presentations than would hearing Ss. It was also hypothesized that hearing impaired Ss would show different cluster…

Three experiments used "rhyme priming," a methodology in which lexical decisions to a visually presented word are facilitated when the word is preceded by a rhyming word, to investigate the access and maintenance of speech-based codes in sentence comprehension. In these experiments, the pairs were visually dissimilar rhymes, such as…

Noting the differences in processing information by reading and by listening, two studies examined subjects' ability to detect errors in written and oral prose. In both experiments, college students were presented with four expository passages drawn from different written sources. All passages were approximately 300 words and 5 paragraphs long,…

Investigates the impact of varying levels of time compression on comprehensive, interpretive, and short-term listening. Finds that comprehensive listening performance deteriorates significantly as speech compression levels increase, while interpretive and short-term listening performance remain stable until a high degree of time compression is…

Two experiments were conducted (1) to identify the component processes of language comprehension that draw upon cognitive capacity for their execution, and (2) to determine differences in patterns of resource allocation during integrative processing for good and poor readers. In the first experiment, nine good and nine poor college-age readers…

More than 100 college students enrolled in a reading and study skills course participated in a study designed to show the effects of retrieval speed on adult reading comprehension. A microcomputer version of the Posner task was used to measure memory retrieval speed, and reading and listening comprehension were measured from McCall-Crabbs…

A large stratified sample of university undergraduate students differing in reading ability performed a diverse set of psychometric and information processing tasks in a study exploring the role of visual information processing skill as a component in reading ability. Using a correlation analysis of individual differences, the interrelationships…