Integrated reading-into-writing assessment has become increasingly common in second language English for Academic Purposes assessment. It is viewed as a means of potentially increasing the authenticity and therefore validity of assessment that aims to measure a candidate's readiness for the demands of academic writing. While there is a body of…

This research investigates critical thinking skills in reading comprehension of English as Second Language (ESL) students in an Australian context and proposes a number of pedagogical methods for ESL teachers and educators. The research has two aims: (1) to gain a thorough understanding of ESL students' ability to read English critically in their…

University educators have observed the concurrent problems of student attrition, higher than normal or desired failure rates and students struggling to complete assessable and non-assessable work, for instance, set readings. Recent public commentary has pointed to the widening participation agenda with its lowering of university entrance scores…

While the importance of academic language and literacies in students' meaningful participation in higher education has been well-explored, studies have focused on writing rather than reading. There has been a significant silence in the literature around what constitutes reading in higher education, the sociocultural complexities of reader…

The boundary paradigm was used to investigate individual differences in the extraction of lexical information from the parafovea in sentence reading. The preview of a target word was manipulated so that it was identical (e.g., "sped"), a higher frequency orthographic neighbor ("seed"), a nonword neighbor ("sted"), or…

This study explored the experiences of university students who identified as always having had reading difficulties. Thirty-three participants, all from one Australian university, were surveyed and 10 were also interviewed. Findings revealed that many shared academic challenges related to studying, along with a belief that their difficulties were…

This paper introduces the concept of "reading resilience": students' ability to read and interpret complex and demanding literary texts by drawing on advanced, engaged, critical reading skills. Reading resilience is a means for rethinking the place and pedagogies of close reading in the contemporary literary studies classroom. Our…

The main objective of this study is to determine the knowledge, education and attitudes of Chinese, Indian and Arab speaking students in Australia towards the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) test. A questionnaire was administered to 200 students at six university language centers to investigate their overall response towards…

In this study, I examined reported frequency of text messaging, use of textese and literacy skills (reading accuracy, spelling and reading fluency) in a sample of American college students. Participants reported using text messaging, social networking sites and textese more often than was reported in previous (2009) research, and their frequency…

Two experiments investigated the relationship between masked form priming and individual differences in reading and spelling proficiency among university students. Experiment 1 assessed neighbor priming for 4-letter word targets from high- and low-density neighborhoods in 97 university students. The overall results replicated previous evidence of…

Using normal adult readers, this study examined the relative involvement of magnocellular and parvocellular processes in reading English phonologically regular pseudowords and irregular words presented in isolation and in contiguity from left to right. The data showed that a low temporal frequency visual measure that implied more parvocellular…

Examined masked-form priming in groups of developing and skilled readers (elementary students and adults). In a lexical decision task, children showed significantly greater priming than adults for high N (neighborhood-size) words. A gradual attenuation across age was not found. The results suggest that the adaptation to lexical density may not…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 11th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2014), October 25-27, 2014, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) and endorsed by the Japanese Society for Information and Systems in…

As the global economy becomes more integrated, incorporating international experiences into college curricula becomes increasingly desirable for American students and their counterparts abroad. This paper describes one model for creating an international, Web-based, distance-learning classroom that can be used as a guide for those who might wish…