This article asserts that a carefully administered informal reading inventory (IRI) provides important information on low-achieving readers that is "not" provided by an end-of-grade standardized reading test. Using case studies of students' IRI performance, we address the concept of instructional level and the necessity of teaching low…

This literature synthesis examines empirical literature on interventions and measures used in experimental studies of reading comprehension for students with both autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID) or intensive support needs. Eleven studies met inclusion criteria. We present the effectiveness of the interventions and…

Meaningful learning should bring learners to meet their entire goals--both an achievement in academic skills and everyday life skills. This current study focused on the implementation of project-based learning (PBL) in an EFL classroom for young adult learners at a university level. The study aimed at the development of students' performance in…

This study aims to investigate the effect of suprasegmental phonological training on connected-text reading comprehension of Chinese university students with different English reading proficiency levels. A sample of 160 freshmen was recruited and randomly divided into experimental and control groups, and the experimental group was given a 12-week…

Positive and significant correlations ranging from 0.34 to 0.51 were found between self-reported pleasure reading (books, newspapers and magazines) and self-reported competence in speaking, listening, reading and writing English, among teachers in Korea whose responsibilities included teaching English as a foreign language. This result confirms…

Purpose: This study sought to comprehensively examine the reading skills and subskills of children with cochlear implants (CIs) and gain insight into the processes underlying their early reading development. Method: Fourteen 6- to 9-year-old children with CIs were assessed on a range of reading and spoken language measures. Their performances were…

This study examines the relationships among various major factors that may affect the difficulty level of language tests in an attempt to enhance the robustness of item difficulty estimation, which constitutes a crucial factor ensuring the equivalency of high-stakes tests. The observed difficulties of the reading and listening sections of two EFL…

Experiential learning opportunities support readers in developing the background knowledge that is essential for comprehension. When authentic experiences are not feasible, virtual reality experiences serve as a vicarious approach to help readers have opportunities that promote comprehension. Rooted in experiential learning theory, virtual reality…

We know that reading involves coordination between textual characteristics and visual attention, but research linking eye movements during reading and comprehension assessed after reading is surprisingly limited, especially for reading long connected texts. We tested two competing possibilities: (1) the weak association hypothesis: Links between…

We investigated how two cues to contrast--beat gesture and contrastive pitch accenting--affect comprehenders' cognitive load during processing of spoken referring expressions. In two visual-world experiments, we orthogonally manipulated the presence of these cues and their felicity, or fit, with the local (sentence-level) referential context in…

The Action-Process-Object-Schema (APOS) theory is applied to study student understanding of implicit differentiation in the context of functions of one variable. The APOS notions of Schema and schema development in terms of the intra-, inter-, and trans-triad are used to analyze semi-structured interviews with 25 students who had just finished…

Reading comprehension is an incredibly complex, purposeful activity that involves simultaneous orchestration and integration of multiple processes. However, dominant perspectives suggest that two clusters of skills, word reading and language comprehension, account for successful reading. Such two-factor models are problematic because they do not…

While the effects of pattern learning on language processing are well known, the way in which pattern learning shapes exploratory behavior has long gone unnoticed. We report on the way in which individual differences in statistical pattern learning affect performance in the domain of language along multiple dimensions. Analyzing data from healthy…

Difficulties in learning (and thus teaching) statistical inference are well reported in the literature. We argue the problem emanates not only from the way in which statistical inference is taught but also from what exactly is taught as statistical inference. What makes statistical inference difficult to understand is that it contains two logics…

This study examined the monitoring abilities of trilinguals in reading comprehension, addressing the following questions: Is comprehension monitoring related to reading comprehension across first, second, and third languages? Is comprehension monitoring shared across the languages of trilingual adults (domain-general) or rather linked to language…