Reading motivation is an important factor that can predict reading performance in elementary school. The present study aimed to investigate whether reading motivation could mediate the relationship between reading skills at the beginning of school and reading performance in the middle of elementary school. Longitudinal data from 979 students (52%…

Literacy is a term generally used for adults and young people. Basically, it is an acquisition that includes the process of reading, writing and understanding symbols in any language. While this concept, whose definition and scope has expanded over time, refers to people who can only say their names in the past, today it refers to individuals who…

Connectives such as "because" and "but" are crucial for signaling coherence relations in discourse. They contribute to a better reading comprehension and, thus, academic performance. The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of connective development during teenage years by studying individual differences in…

Background: The important role of phonological processing for reading has been demonstrated by many studies. The purpose of this research was to investigate the role of phonological processing for reading in Russian. Specifically, we tested whether the overall complexity of a phonological task predicts reading fluency and reading comprehension.…

Investigations into the relations between phonological processing and math performance have yielded contradictory results. These contradictions might be related to small sample sizes and/or cross-sectional designs of previous studies that limited the possibility of generalizing the findings obtained. The first goal of this study was to estimate…

This study examined the attitudes of postgraduate biology students of three top-ranked Russian universities towards the foreign accents of non-native English-speaking lecturers. Fifty participants responded to a questionnaire, the main purpose of which was to explore the listeners' perceptions of professors' accents and their influence on…

The article considers the concept of reading literacy as a means of successful socialization of foreign students of Elabuga Institute of Kazan Federal University. As a prerequisite for the research served the growth of number of foreign students in the Institute. That in its chain caused the problem of socialization of foreign students in the…

In this study, we performed a latent profile analysis of reading and related skills in a large (n = 733) sibpair sample of Russian readers at risk for reading difficulties. The analysis suggested the presence of seven latent profiles, of which two were characterized by relatively high performance on measures of spelling and reading comprehension…

Improving listening comprehension skills is one of the urgent contemporary educational problems in the field of second language acquisition. Understanding how L2 listening comprehension works can have a serious influence on language pedagogy. The aim of the paper is to discuss the practical and methodological value of the notion of the perception…

Testlets are subsets of test items that are based on the same stimulus and are administered together. Tests that contain testlets are in widespread use in language testing, but they also share a fundamental problem: Items within a testlet are locally dependent with possibly adverse consequences for test score interpretation and use. Building on…

D. Elkonin's thesis that thinking is much more closely related to writing than to oral speech formed the basis of our three-year formative experiment at the elementary school level. In order to test this idea, second-graders through fourth-graders were given a few assignments in which they were asked to exchange thoughts in writing with their…

The article summarizes the study of Reading Comprehension Tasks utilized in preparation for Unified (Russian) State Exam. The corpus of reading tasks was analyzed with the use of the classification algorithm developed by Weir and Urquhart (1998), and aimed at determining the level of engagement (local or global) and type of engagement (literal or…

The article summarizes the results of the comparative study of Reading comprehension texts used in B2 level tests: Unified (Russia) State Exam in English (EGE) and Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE). The research conducted was mainly focused on six parameters measured with the Coh-Metrix, a computational tool producing indices of the…

This study reports on the measured proficiency-referenced learning outcomes during study abroad of a large, multi-institutional cohort (N=1,881) of U.S. students of Russian who have undertaken intensive language study on ACTR-administered formal language study programs at Russian universities for periods of 2, 4, and 9 months over the course of…

Investigated Russian children's color-term acquisition, testing one theory of color universals using acquisition order as a basicness measure and determining whether two terms for blue were genuinely basic. Testing on color-term listing, production, and comprehension indicated that color-term acquisition order agreed with the theory. The two blue…