This study investigates the potential of "VoiceThread" (VT) as a learning tool in order to enhance learners' performance and confidence, and to provide the basis for continuing independent practice. The participants were students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds on a 10-week English for Academic Purposes (EAP)…

The aim of this study was to explore how the Coding as Another Language (CAL) curriculum, developed by Boston College's DevTech Research Group and utilizing the ScratchJr app, impacted students' computational thinking, coding skills, and reading comprehension. To accomplish this, the research team randomly assigned thirteen schools in a…

This study examined the extent to which prior beliefs and reading instructions impacted elements of a reader's mental representation of multiple texts. College students' beliefs about childhood vaccinations were assessed before reading two anti-vaccine and two pro-vaccine texts. Participants in the experimental condition read for the purpose of…

This transnational comparative study between Costa Rica and the United States provides an in-depth understanding of the similarities and differences of the early literacy practices of educators in the Pre-Kindergarten to Kindergarten classroom settings. Drawing upon Costa Rica's curricular approach to Early Childhood Education, based upon the…

This study aimed to examine Grade 7 students' perceptions toward Math word problems to help improve their problem-solving skills since the said skill is important and essential for all students to possess. This study used a descriptive survey made by the researchers and consisted of 15 statements of feelings regarding Math word problems; the…

Sharing the same theoretical basis of extensive reading, "extensive listening" refers to learner exposure to a great deal of comprehensible spoken input. While the effectiveness of extensive reading has been widely acknowledged in many countries, empirical support of extensive listening is limited. This small-scale study adopted a…

The experience of psychosis can sweep into a life like a violent storm. In this paper, I first attempt to fully imagine the experience of such a storm by drawing on first person accounts and then consider the clinical encounter between mental health practitioners and those who find themselves amidst this storm. I reflect on ways we can better…

Children can understand iconic co-speech gestures that characterize entities by age 3 (Stanfield et al. in "J Child Lang" "40"(2):1-10, 2014; e.g., "I'm drinking" + tilting hand in C-shape to mouth as if holding a glass). In this study, we ask whether children understand co-speech gestures that characterize…

We used Chinese prenominal relative clauses (RCs) to test the predictions of two competing accounts of sentence comprehension difficulty: the experience-based account of Levy, 2008) and the Dependency Locality Theory (DLT; Gibson, 2000). Given that in Chinese RCs, a classifier and/or a passive marker BEI can be added to the sentence-initial…

We investigated the influence of globally ungrammatical local syntactic constraints on sentence comprehension, as well as the corresponding activation of global and local representations. In Experiment 1, participants viewed visual scenes with objects like a carousel and motorbike while hearing sentences with noun phrase (NP) or verb phrase (VP)…

This study examined how secondary teachers supported their students' comprehension of informational text. Four content-area teachers--English, science, social studies, and vocational--were observed and interviewed in this study based on hermeneutic phenomenology methods. In addition, the teachers provided a sample of lessons delivered outside the…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the effect of storytelling in helping children read and comprehend English in primary schools. Design/methodology/approach: The study includes 44 eight-year-old students, being divided into two equal groups. They are Catalan/Spanish native speakers, and their English level is pre-A1 (CEFR). The two groups…

Purpose: The conventional amplification devices render minimal or no benefit at abating the speech perception problems of individuals with auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder (ANSD). This study was undertaken to evaluate the effect of noise reduction strategies (multiband spectral subtraction, Wiener-as, Karhunen-Loeve transform [Subspace], and…

Training and rehabilitation activities for convicts and detainees are of utmost importance for a state's national policy in terms of their targeted lives after release. The purpose of this study is to put forward whether socio-cultural activities such as debate, panel, forum, open session used in education and training activities for the…

This paper discusses the role of scaffolded reading instruction in democratic education. Focusing on a case study of a high school civic unit on the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis, it argues the importance of such reading instruction. Students noted the challenges they experienced when reading complex texts on the topic. Yet, scaffolded…