Sensemaking is conceptualized as a trajectory to develop better understanding and is advocated as one of the fundamental practices in science education. However, the field is lacking of a framework to view the prolonged process of sensemaking that starts from a raise of uncertainty of a target phenomenon to a grasping of a better understanding of…

The Simple View of Reading (SVR), which posits that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension, has been studied extensively with school-age readers. However, little is known about the intricacies of the SVR for adults who struggle with reading. This study addresses notable gaps in this literature, including the…

Recent studies have shown contradictory results on the influence of digital technology on the level of reading comprehension performance in college students. This paper examines the existence of differences in reading comprehension between the use of digital technology and traditional support in college students. A meta-analysis of international…

Introduction: Across the world, mathematical expressions are represented very differently in braille. The aim of this study was (1) to gain an overall insight in mathematical braille notations and (2) to investigate how mathematical braille notations support braille readers in reading and comprehending mathematical expressions. Method: Twenty…

In light of recent concerns in the United States and the United Kingdom regarding the rote and restrictive nature of English literature instruction, this article offers an approach to teaching literature rooted not in knowledge, as literary pedagogy is often conceptualised, but instead in understanding. Reading for understanding extends beyond…

Purpose: Nearly 50 years ago, Durkin (1978-1979) conducted a seminal observation study on reading comprehension teaching in Grades 3 through 6. She reported that teachers rarely taught reading comprehension (less than 1% of instructional time). Since then, we have gained substantial knowledge about teaching reading comprehension. We aimed to…

In discourses involving implicit causality, the implicit cause of the event is referentially predictable, that is, it is likely to be rementioned. However, it is unclear how referential predictability is calculated. We test two possible explanations: (1) The frequency account suggests that people learn that implicit causes are predictable through…

We examine the role of culture in comprehension. Prominent theories of comprehension conceptualized the outcome of reading as learners' construction of a cognitive representation of texts. We emphasize that such representation reflects not only texts' content, but also individuals' understandings of the real world, as described in texts. We…

Understanding visual narratives requires readers to track dimensions of time, spatial location, and characters across a sequence. Previous work has found situational changes across adjacent panels differ cross-culturally, but few works have examined such situational dimensions across extended sequences. We therefore investigated situational…

This dissertation explores clear speech which is defined as a specific speaking style people adopt when fluent communication could be compromised for various reasons. Although acoustic properties and their perceptual benefits of clear speech produced by monolingual speakers of English are well documented, there has only been a small body of past…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

Performing a stay in a country where the L2 is the official language can provide the perfect immersion for L2 development (traditional study abroad). In the case of English learners, internationalization and the role of English as a lingua franca make it unnecessary to perform the stay in an English-speaking country. Hence, an increasing number of…

Listening to academic lectures in a second language (L2) can be a daunting task, as the listener faces various challenges related to processing the speech stream, prioritizing the importance of information, and deciding when, where and how to take notes. A host of factors can contribute to student comfort in and ability to take "good"…

Purpose: Measuring the growth of young children's vocabulary is important for researchers seeking to understand language learning as well as for clinicians aiming to identify early deficits. The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are parent report instruments that offer a reliable and valid method for measuring early…

Based on previous work related to pre-service teachers' self-efficacy for literacy instruction, this study examined their knowledge of literacy instruction and classroom-level contextual factors (i.e. coursework and fieldwork experiences). Pre-service teachers from two distinct contexts (Canada and USA) were given surveys ("TSELI" and…