Reading comprehension tasks are commonly used for developing students' reading ability. In order to adaptively recommend reading comprehension materials to students engaged in computerized testing, the information in an item bank (a collection of test items stored in a dataset) must be effectively indexed. Familiarity with the topics present in…

Literacy is the most important skill children are required to master during their early school life. At the same time, much has been written about both the inadequate preparation of teachers to teach reading and the ever-increasing number of poor readers in our schools. In this study, we examined teachers' perceptions of the factors that have…

The goal of the current research was to determine if conceptual metaphors are activated when people read idioms within a text. Participants read passages that included idioms that were consistent ("blow your top") or inconsistent ("bite his head off") with an underlying conceptual metaphor (ANGER IS HEATED FLUID IN A CONTAINER)…

Drawing from theories of visual culture, social semiotics, and multimodality, the researchers conducted a qualitative multimodal content analysis of the covers of 21 young adult (YA) books that had been adapted as graphic novels (GNs). This study showed that the GN covers emphasized character and that the ages of the represented characters seemed…

After a year of teaching deaf students, Arathy Manoharan realized that she needed to be able to apply the principles of bilingual deaf education in order to be able to do justice to her profession. For this reason, at the age of 23, she moved to the United States to pursue another master's degree in deaf education from McDaniel College in…

T R ('Tim') Miles (1923-2008) was one of the most important pioneers of dyslexia research and treatment in the UK. He worked with dyslexics from the time of his appointment to a lectureship at Bangor in 1949 and later, with his wife, established the Dyslexia Centre there. Miles' professional role and theoretical contribution are reasonably well…

Purpose: A common way of eliciting speech from individuals is by using passages of written language that are intended to be read aloud. Read passages afford the opportunity for increased control over the phonetic properties of elicited speech, of which phonetic balance is an often-noted example. No comprehensive analysis of the phonetic balance of…

Electrophysiology studies have identified two event-related potentials that are modulated by predictive processes during language comprehension: the N400 and a frontal positivity. The N400 is smaller when words are presented within highly restrictive sentences, indicating reduced lexical retrieval costs. Violations of strong predictions generate…

Background: This trial aimed to measure the effects of extrinsic and intrinsic factors on users' comprehension of health information provided in adapted written "easy read" material. Method: Sixty adults with intellectual disabilities undertook The Easy Read Task, randomly allocated with stratification by reading ability to one of four…

This paper explores the interactive quality of memories and how they lived on in the dataset of a two-year study conducted several years ago, in which a group of women engaged in close reading and memoir-writing practices, unpacking their personal memories to gain insight into their lived experiences. In the process of analysing the data from the…

In this article, the authors challenge the ongoing dehumanization of people of color by arguing for the use of Black texts as core readings in courses on adult learning rather than as add-ons or "special topics."

Reading comprehension requires readers to connect ideas within and across texts to produce a coherent mental representation. One important factor in that complex process regards the cohesion of the document(s). Here, we tackle the challenge of providing researchers and practitioners with a tool to visualize text cohesion both within (intra) and…

Practical Implications: The authors argue that disciplinary literacy is a relatively new conception of literacy skills in various content areas, and therefore jumping immediately to exemplary practices is unwise. Instead the authors recommend collaboration and inquiry as tools to generate and refine practices thoughtfully over time. [For the…

"The Literacy Workshop" is a first-of-its-kind resource that offers a practical process for creating an integrated literacy workshop using demonstration lessons that align with current curriculum standards. By weaving together the common threads of literacy learning, you can increase the time your students spend engaged in authentic…

The aim of this article is twofold. First, it provides a general overview of reading compre­hension by outlining classic models of single-text comprehension and more recent models of multiple-text comprehension and sourcing during reading comprehension. Second, the article highlights important sources of individual differences in reading…