Reading comprehension is critical and challenging for the English learning process. EFL (English as Foreign Language) learners often do not understand the meaning of the text due to the lack of an authentic learning context. This easily leads learners to read literally without deeply understanding. To address this issue, an article-structure…

In the Netherlands, the quality of the reading curriculum is currently under debate because of disappointing results on national and international assessments of students' reading skills and motivation. In a mixed-method study, we analyzed the content of Dutch textbooks for reading comprehension instruction (i.e., the implemented curriculum) and…

Taking Swedish secondary school students as a point of departure, this article focuses on aspects of teaching and learning critical literacy and specifically on what students identify as argumentative text structure. Challenges connected to teaching critical literacies can be considered quite big, since studies show that students have difficulties…

This study analyzed the potential transfer effects on reading comprehension skills of two different training programs administered to 9- to 10-year-old children attending fourth grade classes. One training program was based on a working memory updating paradigm (i.e., words, digits, sentence and text updating working memory tasks). The other…

Mira Bai, a saint-poet of North India is an important figure in medieval Hindi literature. Her "bhajan"-s (songs) profoundly represent the transforming of consciousness working through conceptual metaphors which fall in the realm of religious poetry wherein target domains are generally abstract. Since, the working of the mind is more…

The purpose of the present pedagogical experience was to address the English language writing needs of university-level students pursuing a degree in bilingual education with an emphasis in the teaching of English. Using mentor texts and coding academic writing structures, an instructional design was developed to directly address the shortcomings…

Preliminary efficacy data are reported for a research-based reading intervention designed for struggling readers in high school. PHAST PACES teaches (a) word identification strategies, (b) knowledge of text structures, and (c) reading comprehension strategies. In a quasi-experimental design, 268 intervention and 83 waiting list control students…

This paper presents preliminary results from classroom-initiated research using text-graphing to develop metacognitive awareness among English-as-a-Second-Language engineering students writing the literature review section of their master's theses. Results found that text graphing can raise students' awareness of the rhetorical structure of…

This study examined the writing strategies and text characteristics associated with discovering a scientific principle by writing about an experiment. Sixty-four university students (non-science majors) carried out a physics experiment concerning either buoyancy, or the forces acting on a balance scale, then wrote an informal journal-style note…

Presents the results of two studies where children were taught to identify textual cues, syntactic and semantic, in order to locate main ideas. The children also built graphic representations of these structures and were taught relevant questions to ask regarding comprehension. Results showed significant improvement, especially with older…