Purpose: We explore a new approach to the study of cognitive effort involved in listening to speech by measuring the brain activity in a listener in relation to the brain activity in a speaker. We hypothesize that the strength of this brain-to-brain synchrony (coupling) reflects the magnitude of cognitive effort involved in verbal communication…

South Africa has low literacy levels and teachers face multiple challenges in their endeavours to elevate levels of literacy. This is especially prevalent in rural and township schools where teachers face the additional challenges of isolation, limited resources and access to professional development. This article reports on the findings and…

Previous studies have presented discrepant findings of e-stories' contribution to children's narrative comprehension, which can be attributed to not only the variation of multimedia features among studies but also to learner and text features. The main goal of the present study was to expand understanding of the effect of e-stories on children's…

Recently, the readability of texts has become the focus of reading research because it is believed to have implications for reading comprehension, which is of utmost importance in the field of English as a foreign language (EFL), particularly in the teaching, learning and assessment of reading comprehension. Unfortunately, the influence of text…

In this dissertation, I report results from a study that investigated the impact of students' engagement in a series of tasks in an introductory proof course that was designed to stimulate their learning of reading strategies to support their comprehension of mathematics proofs. Specifically, I investigated the impact of the design of five…

Validated conceptual multiple-choice surveys administered before and after instruction in relevant concepts can be useful tools to gauge the effectiveness of curricula and pedagogical strategies. Here we discuss the use of four different validated surveys to investigate student understanding: The Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey (EMCS), the…

The significance of listening strategy teaching over the past 30 years has become more widely acknowledged since it facilitates listening comprehension. However, few studies on teaching listening strategies have looked at this problem from the viewpoint of the students, and teacher, as well as handling students' motivation, cognitive awareness of…

Reading, like all areas of human learning, is complex and multidimensional. Educational psychology has an opportunity to contribute further to a science of reading, and potentially to a science of reading instruction, by expanding its traditional theoretical and methodological orientations to embrace this complexity. Topics central to this effort…

This study examined putative benefits of testing and production for learning new languages. Undergraduates (N = 156) were exposed to Turkish spoken dialogues under varying learning conditions (retrieval practice, comprehension, verbal repetition) in a computer-assisted language learning session. Participants completed pre- and posttests of number-…

This evaluation study explored a two-year literacy reform effort in a school district with 10 of its 13 elementary schools in the improvement process. Schools were placed in three groups. Group 1 (four schools, 80 teachers) implemented new instructional practices in Year 1 and then added a new curriculum. Group 2 (four schools, 102 teachers)…

For students who perform inconsistently across subjects, teachers face challenges in formulating track recommendations, as their achievement will not point to one secondary school track. This issue may be more prominent for students from diverse backgrounds, given the achievement differences between specific subject domains within these groups.…

Reading comprehension is an extremely important skill that students need to be effective learners; however, a significant percentage of students are reading below grade level on a nationwide scale (National Assessment for Educational Progress, 2019; National Institute of Health as cited by Learning Disabilities Association of America, 2022). In…

This study used a meta-analytic structural equation modeling approach to build extended versions of the simple view of reading (SVR) model in second and foreign language (SFL) learning contexts (i.e., SVR-SFL). Based on the correlation coefficients derived from primary studies, we replicated and integrated two previous extended meta-analytic SVR…

Listeners have been shown to judge second language (L2) users more negatively than L1 speakers on measures of language proficiency and even on personal qualities. However, less is known about what factors affect listener judgment which this study seeks to explore. In the study, one first language (L1) English speaker recorded her spontaneous…

Purpose: Speech recognition in noise is challenging for listeners and appears to require support from executive functions to focus attention on rapidly unfolding target speech, track misunderstanding, and sustain attention. The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that lower executive function abilities explain poorer speech…