As part of continued efforts to ensure inclusivity in assessment, OCR has developed a set of accessibility principles for question design in GCSE Science examinations, which has been applied since 2018. The principles are intended to help ensure that all students can demonstrate their knowledge, understanding and skills to the best of their…

Polysemy, or the property of words having multiple meanings, is a prevalent feature of vocabulary. In this study we validated a new measure of polysemy knowledge for children with English as an additional language (EAL) and a first language (EL1) and examined the relationship between polysemy knowledge and age, language status, and reading…

There have been calls for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education to become more interdisciplinary, reflecting the reality of contemporary research. However, communicating across disciplines is challenging. In this article, I explore what and how students read in the STEM disciplines. I provide an overview of key topics in…

This paper reports a research project exploring children's peer interactions in group reading discussions where a teacher was not present as an authoritative guide. This context reflects a reality of classroom teaching where most children in the class are completing tasks independently while the teacher is working other groups. In the study, four…

This article investigates the effect of different accents on high- and low-proficiency second language (L2) learners. It begins with testing the English listening proficiency of Chinese students and then compares the influence of three accented English (a British accent, an Australian accent and an Indian accent) on their listening scores.…

Audiobook listenership is growing with the increasing availability of devices, platforms and apps offering an ever-wider range of high quality titles. This literature review provides an overview of research exploring the role of audiobooks in supporting children's literacy both at home and in the classroom. It focuses on how positive engagement…

Research in higher education has revealed that only a small proportion of students complete assigned reading during semester. The current studies examined students' reading practices, and sought to explore potential factors underlying these practices. Three studies were conducted. Study 1 utilised a questionnaire to examine how long students spend…

Many overseas students in Higher Education in the UK struggle to understand the compulsory texts for their course, and obtain lower scores for their modules than their monolingual peers. While the existence of this achievement gap is well established in the literature, little is known about the ways in which overseas students in HE with limited…

Reading and telling stories to children improves their narrative skills, which is well-documented for monolinguals, but not for bilinguals. We investigated whether bilingual narratives improve when the child is provided with a model story. We studied the narratives of Polish-English bilingual children (n = 75, mean age 5;7 years; months) raised in…

A rich home literacy environment (HLE) fosters students' academic achievement. However, the link between HLE and children's reading comprehension is unclear. This study examined the effects of HLE factors on children's reading comprehension through a meta-analysis of 59 studies conducted between 1998 and 2018. Results of the meta-analysis…

In this study, we investigated developmental aspects of eye movements during reading of three languages (English, German, and Finnish) that vary widely in their orthographic complexity and predictability. Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules are rather complex in English and German but relatively simple in Finnish. Despite their differences in…

English as an International Language (EIL) is grounded in the concept of multiplicity. Such proliferation of non-native varieties of English leads to several controversies including the intelligibility of its speakers to listeners from various language backgrounds. Although this concern has been continuously addressed in EIL research, the focus…

This study investigated EFL learners' comprehension of scalar properties of three types of emotion verbs, namely, fear type, liking and disliking emotion verbs and compare their performance with instructors and native speakers of English. The participants were 38 nonnative pre-service teachers from ELT department at a state university in Turkey,…

This article examines the assertion that good reading comprehension is, in part, reliant on what the Primary National Curriculum terms "knowledge of the world". Drawing on academic literature rather than first-hand observation, the article explores how the phrase "knowledge of the world" may be interpreted and enacted by…

Purpose: Reading comprehension is a key indicator of academic and psychosocial outcomes. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) tend to find reading comprehension challenging. This study aimed to explore the literal and inferential (cohesive, elaborative, and lexical) comprehension of children with DLD, their typically developing (TD)…