The present study attempted to validate the linguistic threshold hypothesis (LTH) and the interactive-compensatory model (ICM) in an English as a foreign language (EFL) setting by assessing the relative contributions of English proficiency and reading strategy use to English reading and examining the mutual compensation between these two factors…

Much has been written about the decline in Australian literacy standards, as measured by international tests, and concerns have been expressed about the quality of teacher preparation for teaching early literacy to young children in their first years of school. Preservice teacher knowledge of research evidence supporting the essential components…

There have been many studies exploring the advantages that bilingualism confers to individuals' working memory and metacognition (see Ransdell, 2006; Del Missier et al., 2010). The hypothesis of language critical period states that if no language learning and teaching happen during the critical period, an individual will never be able to fully…

The purpose of the study was to investigate differences in writers' abilities to perceive global text organisation in self-, peer- and teacher/researcher-authored essays. Eight student participants were identified as proficient, middle or developing, based on the levels of paragraph subordination, the average number of T-Units and the number of…

The importance of teacher read-alouds in language teaching and learning has been known for years, but we know very little about how older English learners with limited English skills can benefit from this practice. The author shares how interactive read-alouds with picture books can be designed to help emerging college learners of English as a…

This study provides a broad, macro-analysis of how the home literacy environment (HLE) manifests among Mayan families with preschool-aged children in Yucatan, Mexico. Despite a substantial body of work showing the significant contribution of the HLE to children's reading achievement in the U.S., little work examines the HLE and children's learning…

It is difficult to read mathematical expressions in braille, whether or not in coordination with text to speech (TTS) synthesis. The researchers in this study investigated the effect of an intervention on the braille readers' performance in reading and comprehending mathematical expressions as well as the braille readers' ability to make…

The Design Implementation Framework, or DIF, is a design approach that evaluates learner and user experience at multiple points in the development of intelligent tutoring systems. In this chapter, we explore how DIF was used to make system modifications to iSTART, a game-based intelligent tutoring system for reading comprehension. Using DIF as a…

The purpose of this conceptual replication study was to investigate the efficacy of an early literacy intervention when it was implemented by special educators in general education classrooms with students in the class participating in the lessons. The study was conducted in 16 schools in three states. Eighty students with severe disabilities…

Readers' memory for belief-consistent texts is often stronger than for belief-inconsistent texts (text-belief consistency effect). However, presenting belief-consistent and belief-inconsistent texts alternatingly reduces the discrepancy between the memory strengths of belief-consistent and belief-inconsistent texts. The present study used eye…

The current study examined the contribution of cross-language phonological and morphological awareness to reading acquisition in bilingual children. Participants were 140 children (M[subscript age] = 8.26 years) between Grades 1-4 who learned Chinese as their first language and English as their second language. Awareness of phoneme, onset-rime,…

Storybook reading is the major source of literacy exposure for beginning readers. The present study tracked 4-year-old Chinese children's eye movements while they were reading simulated storybook pages. Their eye-movement patterns were examined in relation to their word learning gains. The same reading list, consisting of 20 two-character Chinese…

Scaffolding has been shown to facilitate students' text comprehension and task performance. Yet less is known about the necessity of scaffolding for competent students reading unfamiliar content. To explore that question, we investigated the effects of two knowledge scaffolding techniques (i.e., mobilization and concept mapping) versus control on…

Background knowledge is a strong predictor of reading comprehension, yet little is known about how different types of background knowledge affect comprehension. The study investigated the impacts of both domain and topic-specific background knowledge on students' ability to comprehend and learn from science texts. High school students (n = 3,650)…

Background: The lexical quality hypothesis proposes that successful reading comprehension requires high quality lexical representations, which allow for efficient retrieval. These retrieval operations have however not been specified. Methods: We investigated the contribution of semantic retrieval to reading comprehension in 119 Dutch children in…