Humanities educators are frequently frustrated by students' poor engagement in reading. The contemporary student experience is characterised by disruption and precarity. Similarly, is that of teachers who work in casual employment. This discussion is located within broader conversations around the neoliberal university, but aims to make more…

The goal of the present investigation is to determine how undergraduate students think about critical reading. We asked 249 students to rate the usefulness of several critical reading skills, how often those skills are taught, and whether they practice those skills when working on their assignments. We found that students consider more complex…

Background: South Africa's reading problems are evident in tertiary education, particularly among students studying in a foreign language. Therefore, many reading researchers in South Africa have argued that poor reading skills among tertiary students are a direct result of poor reading skills at school. Some research has found that psychological…

Research has shown upwards of 40% of adult learners entering community college may need developmental education intervention in reading and writing skills. Of those who enroll in developmental education, a large portion will never receive college-level credit and will leave the community college. This research investigated a compressed reading and…

Engaging college students in purposeful academic tasks designed to foster both reading and writing competencies requires calculated decision-making regarding the goals and benefits of the literacy tasks used in college courses. Consequently, we explore text reformulation as a literacy strategy that aims to enrich students' reading and writing…

Background: South Africans are widely perceived as not being a reading nation. For many South African children, their first encounter with books and stories occurs when they formally enter the schooling system. This raises the question of how teachers understand their role as reading role models. Objectives: This article aims to investigate how…

In this study, an undergraduate teacher education course is used to explore whether and how academic reading seminars "reflect the theoretical notion of academic literacies and provide a learning environment for developing academic and professional learning and engagement." The data analyzed in this article are transcribed recordings of…

The current research used the Proficient Academic Reader (PAR) framework to explore whether reading strategies, task awareness, and motivation predicted college students' literacy skills over and above foundational skills (e.g., decoding, vocabulary). Specifically, the current research investigated the unique contribution of the PAR constructs to…

Purpose: The lexical quality (LQ) hypothesis predicts that a skilled reader's lexicon will be inhabited by a range of low- to high-quality items, and the probability of representing a word with high quality varies as a function of person-level, word-level, and item-specific variables. These predictions were tested with spelling accuracy as a gauge…

This article deals with reading as a significant challenge for higher education students. The study aimed to understand students' experiences of challenges in reading during their first three semesters at university and how they handled these challenges. It is a qualitative case study built on in-depth interviews with nine people studying to be…

The purpose of this study was to examine clusters of less-skilled college readers. College students with below average reading comprehension skills (N = 77) read and thought aloud about four texts, recalled the texts, and completed standardized assessments of reading skills. Based on the findings of cluster analyses of the cognitive processes…

This case study investigated first-year composition students' perceptions of instructors' written feedback. Participants reported on their understanding of the role of feedback, how they processed feedback, and if and how they used it. Thirty-one participants completed a short online survey; the responses were analyzed to identify students who…

Teachers understand the importance of think-alouds, yet research shows that think-alouds may be used ineffectively in practice. Often, this results from the difficulty of explicitly sharing the inner thought processes of competent readers and writers in transferable ways for students. To our knowledge, a tool for helping preservice teachers…

The teaching of critical thinking (CT) has become an important requirement in many English language classrooms at different educational levels, yet little is known about how teachers promote the learning of CT. This article reports on a qualitative study examining the ways in which two university English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers in…

The purpose of this study is to develop an instructional model to improve the reading abilities of technical documents, and to enhance students' positive learning attitudes for TVE college students in China. This study developed a teaching model based on the Information Processing Approach, Vygotsky's Scaffolding, and Motivation. This teaching…