Aiming to verify the predictive value of oral narrative structure on reading acquisition, we followed 253 children (first and second graders) during an entire school year, assessing oral narratives and reading performances in five sessions. Transcriptions of oral narratives were represented as word-recurrence graphs to measure connectedness…

In the current study, we examined relations between text features (e.g., word concreteness, referential cohesion) and reading comprehension using multilevel logistic models. The sample was 158 native English-speaking students between 8 years, 8 months and 11 years, 2 months of age with a wide range of reading ability. In line with the simple view…

This paper aims to explore the impact of freeform digital games on primary school students' narrative skills, in terms of linguistic cohesion and semantic coherence, compared to other digital media, such as formally structured digital games and movies. A total of 128 Year 6 Primary school students participated in this research. Initially, students…

Conjunctions facilitate text cohesion and comprehension by making explicit the logical relationships between ideas in written language. Conjunctions may be challenging for English language learners (ELLs) because of their novel, abstract, and text-connecting role. In this longitudinal study we aimed to clarify the connections among comprehension…

The principal aim of strategy-focused instruction is to teach students strategies to control their writing processes and achieve quality writing. For this purpose, nine 4th grade Elementary School classes from three different schools (N = 215) were randomly allocated to two forms of strategy-focused program called cognitive self-regulation…

Background and Aim: The effects of text cohesion and added pictures on acquired knowledge have been heavily studied each in isolation. Furthermore, studies on the effects of specific characteristics of pictures, whether facilitating or hindering, are scarce. Schnotz's ITCP Model (2014) allows to formulate hypotheses regarding the combined effect…

Gifted students get bored of reading authoritative and descriptive multimodal texts. They need coherent, explanatory, and interactive texts. Moreover, because of the pandemic, gifted students took courses online, and teachers had to conduct their lessons on digital online tools with multimodal representations. They posted supplementary teaching…

The improvement of writing skills is one of the aims of the educational system. The present study implemented strategy-focused instruction through the Cognitive Self-Regulation Instruction (CSRI) program which included three instructional components: Direct Teaching, Modelling, and Peer-Practice. The aim was to explore the short- and long-term…

The purpose of this study is to analyse how vocabulary depth develops in the early years of primary school and to ascertain the effect it has on the quality of the texts produced by the students. A total of 332 Spanish students from the first to fourth grades participated by doing a synonyms/antonyms task to evaluate their vocabulary depth, along…

Purpose: Complex features of science texts present idiosyncratic challenges for middle grade readers, especially in a post-Common Core educational world where students' learning is dependent on understanding informational text. The primary aim of this study was to explore how middle school readers process science texts and whether such…

This research looks at the potential of peer interaction practices in improving narrative competence by analyzing the efficacy of peer learning on children's oral narrative productions. Gains on a macro-level (structure and coherence of the narrative) and a micro-level (cohesion of the narrative) were analyzed. Fifty-six primary school children…

The 2018 NAEP Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) study is conducted by NCES to examine fourth-grade students' ability to read passages out loud with sufficient speed, accuracy, and expression, as well as foundational skills to gauge underlying sources of poor fluency. Oral reading fluency and foundational skills are important components of reading that…

This study describes the use of a game-based writing environment (GWE) to increase textual cohesion in students' writing and improve their writing attitude. The participants were 113 third-grade students in Taiwan; the study was conducted over two semesters. A GWE was used for the experimental group (n = 56), and a conventional writing environment…

Text complexity in elementary classrooms is typically measured by traditional readability tools, which rely on surface-level measures of word and sentence complexity. Theoretical and empirical work on text complexity, however, indicates that additional measures of semantics, syntax, and discourse structure may be equally important for…

Despite a seemingly fragmented interactional context, teachers and students in classrooms routinely manage to co-construct coherent, inter-related, and individually adapted learning trajectories distributed over days and weeks. The aim of this article is to explore with what interactional resources progressivity is accomplished in learning…