Microlearning has increased its popularity for course designs in eLearning environments due to short attention spans and time constraints. The objective of this designed-based research is to describe the multiple iterations of design, development, and revision of a general framework for creating a microlearning reading mobile application. First,…

This preregistered study examined whether extraneous illustration details promote attentional competition and hinder reading comprehension in beginning readers. Reading comprehension was highest in the Streamlined Condition (text + relevant illustrations) compared to a Standard Condition (text + relevant illustrations + extraneous illustrations)…

Speech technology (automated speech recognition -- ASR and text-to-speech) offers great promise in the field of automated literacy and reading tutors for children. Students in third and fourth grades struggle with generating longer strings of text on a QWERTY keyboard because they still "hunt and peck" for AQ1 the letters and symbols…

Playing games on mobile devices has become an integral part of younger generations' lives. Mobile games foster, among other things, deep concentration. This paper reports on design guidelines derived from observations of six elementary school pupils' engagement over a six-week period during an after-school reading club program. Each meeting…

This paper highlights findings from two aspects of a case study on the partnership between one mid-size California public school district and a private university sponsored literacy project to cultivate teacher efficacy and reignite early student literacy during and after COVID-19 contexts. Grounded in teacher efficacy in literacy instruction and…

Nowadays, Malaysian ESL students struggle to read English texts, particularly narrative texts. Lacking in utilising and applying the suitable reading strategies are among factors that hinder reading comprehension. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) strategy on ESL pupils' narrative reading and…

Some children experience more difficulty than others becoming literate, often at great emotional, intellectual, social, and economic cost to themselves, but also to those who love and care for them, and for society at large. The causes of those difficulties and what to do about them have been the source of much research and sometimes heated…

A gloss refers to a short definition or explanation of the meaning of a word in a text that can assist learners in reading comprehension and vocabulary learning. This study aims to investigate how glosses in English academic texts affect the reading behaviour of ESL undergraduates while reading is taking place. In addition, it also examines the…

Randomized controlled trials in education are necessary to keep pace with the evidence-based practices demanded by schools and the nation. In this study, kindergarten students in a school district in Indiana were randomized on the class level: The experimental condition consisted of students utilizing a computer-adaptive reading program for 15…

The period of the COVID pandemic changed day-to-day full-time teaching into distance learning. Teachers, but also parents without any prior training, had to react immediately. What has long been theoretically talked about professionally, namely the use of digitization of teaching in the online environment, has suddenly become a reality. Long…

This paper presents evidence confirming the validity of the RD design in the Reading Recovery study by examining the ability of the RD design to replicate the 1st grade results observed in the original i3 RCT focused on short-term impacts. Over 1,800 schools participated in the RD study over all four cohort years. The RD design used cutoff-based…

The following semi-autobiographical essay tells a cautionary tale about the entrenched Anglocentrism, Eurocentrism, and Alphabetism in reading and reading disabilities (dyslexia) research. Having been born, raised, and educated in an entirely monolingual English-speaking environment, I later migrated to a country where non-European languages…

We present a study in which multimedia alphabet books were constructed for ten languages using the Learning And Reading Assistant (LARA) platform. We describe the alphabet books we built, the different design features they instantiate, and an initial evaluation using an anonymous online questionnaire. Links are provided to the books themselves,…

Learning to read English requires learning the complex statistical dependencies between orthography and phonology. Previous research has focused on how these statistics are learned in neural network models provided with as much training as needed. Children, however, are expected to acquire this knowledge in a few years of school with only limited…

We propose to use reading time as a metric to report progress in language learning applications. As a case study we use a web-based application that enables learners of a foreign language to read texts from the web and practice vocabulary with interactive exercises generated based on their past readings. The application captures generic…