The purpose of this work is to present a comprehensive curricular approach that helps childhood educators empower students as developing thinkers who, by connecting with literature, build a deeper and more robust cultural understanding of themselves and others. Based on a formal content analysis, 44 picture books from and about the Middle East and…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether third-grade teachers' instructional actions during reading comprehension lessons contributed to their students' reading comprehension achievement. Our framework focused on teachers' emphasis on three dimensions of instruction (pedagogical structure, teacher-directed instruction, and support for…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of homogeneous versus heterogeneous reading-style grouping on EFL students' non-preferred reading style and reading comprehension. The study used a pretest-posttest experimental design. The original subjects of the study (N=86) were Egyptian English major senior students during the 2005/2006…

All educators should be concerned about curriculum. Curriculum is the path to giving students the best possible education enveloping an in-depth learning experience. Dr. Kritsonis's "Ways of Knowing Through the Realms of Meaning" provides a guide for schools to select curriculum that is appropriate, rigorous, and enriched. Through alignment, Dr.…

Rhetorical structure refers to a complex network of relationships and the way the underlying ideas are organized within a text. This study was conducted to see whether explicit instruction of descriptive and causative text organization positively affected L3 reading recall. 240 Turkish students of EFL who had Persian as their second language were…

In the action research project report, the teacher researchers found that many kindergarten and first-grade students did not have the reading readiness skills to be reading at their benchmark target. The purpose of the project was to improve the students overall reading ability. The dates of the project began on September 8 through December 20,…

Iranian Journal of Language Studies (IJLS) is devoted to all areas of language and linguistics. Its aim is to present work of current interest in all areas of language study. No particular linguistic theories or scientific trends are favored: scientific quality and scholarly standing are the only criteria applied in the selection of papers…

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the nature of the topics of the reading passages in ELT coursebooks. To find out the content of the topics, a total number of 15 ELT coursebooks are studied by using both quantitative and qualitative measures. The discrepancies found are discussed and recommendations are made to underline the …

In order to think, to interpret and judge correctly, the humans have to comprehend what they have learned. Concepts are the abstract representatives of the classifications that are formed by objects, events, ideas and behaviors which have common specifications. (Fidan, N., 1985). Concepts reduce the complexity by simplifying the environment that…

The purpose of this paper was to discuss the importance of listening and to examine whether or not transcribing utterances in English using the Korean alphabet improved the accuracy in English sentences produced by a group of Korean college students. A total population of 120 students was divided into two groups, control and experiment. The…

This investigation is about recognizing the effects of comprehension language barriers and adaptability cultural barriers on selected first-generation Vietnamese undergraduate students in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. Most Vietnamese students know little or no English before immigrating to the United States; as such, language and…

Second language research and classroom practice have tended to sideline reading in favor of an emphasis on the oral language development of the English Language Learner (ELL). First-language (L1) reading research is well developed but has limited usefulness to the teacher or researcher interested in second-language (L2) reading. Developing L2…

Despite being one of our most important and most often used modalities, listening is an area of language instruction that is often overlooked by teachers and researchers alike as fertile ground for the enhancement of students' vocabulary knowledge. For low-level learners, especially those not in full control of the first 2000 most-frequent words…

This article highlights significant research about what below grade-level reading means in middle school classrooms and suggests a tested approach to improve reading comprehension levels significantly by using audio books. The use of these audio books can improve reading and academic performance for both English language learners (ELLs) and for…

This paper underscores the effect of text cohesion on EFL reading comprehension. 160 EFL (n=80) and non-EFL (n=80) university students took two versions of a cloze test based on a passage of 750 words length, one developed with every nth word deletion and the other with cohesive word deletion. The results of analyses of variance indicated that…