This study examined the extent to which prior beliefs and reading instructions impacted elements of a reader's mental representation of multiple texts. College students' beliefs about childhood vaccinations were assessed before reading two anti-vaccine and two pro-vaccine texts. Participants in the experimental condition read for the purpose of…

This meta-analysis examines how components of the Simple View of Writing contribute to writing development for English second-language (L2) learners. Previous studies examining first-language learners suggest that transcription and ideation may predict writing achievement. In order to investigate whether these components similarly contribute to L2…

We investigated the contribution of morphological awareness to university students' reading comprehension ability. Although there is considerable evidence that morphological awareness contributes to children's reading ability, there is much less evidence concerning adults; the few studies of adults have not controlled other known predictors of…

The purpose of this study was to examine moment-by-moment fluctuations in text comprehension processing and determine how and when poor and good comprehenders differ. To do so, we reanalyzed a dataset of think-aloud protocols from 138 intermediate elementary students. Both good and poor comprehenders used a variety of processing strategies when…

Silent reading fluency has received limited attention in the school-based literatures across the past decade. We fill this gap by examining both oral and silent reading fluency and their relation to overall abilities in reading comprehension in fourth-grade students. Lower-level reading skills (word reading, rapid automatic naming) and vocabulary…

The present study explored the home literacy environment for Chinese ESL kindergarteners and examined the relationships between home literacy practices and language and literacy skills. Ninety Hong Kong Chinese ESL kindergarteners were assessed for English vocabulary, phonological awareness, letter knowledge and word reading. Their parents…

Examines whether content textbook selections could be rewritten to enhance elementary students' comprehension of unfamiliar vocabulary. Finds that elementary students' vocabulary learning was enhanced when the texts were revised to be more considerate to the reader with attention to completeness, explicitness, proximity, and clarity of context…

Describes the development of a 99-word multiple meaning word list and offers activities designed to develop children's knowledge of multiple meaning words. (FL)

Studies 10 undergraduate university students who were given intensive instruction in metacognitive strategies, which highlighted metacognition and executive control in the reading process. Finds the students (1) understood and applied metacognitive strategies in their personal reading; but (2) applied little of these strategies in tutoring and…

Describes a model for assessment of vocabulary difficulty within the framework of dynamic reading assessment. Follows two seventh-grade students, both experiencing difficulty with vocabulary, through the assessment process. Discusses how one student was referred for speech and language evaluation and the other was not. Presents instructional…

Using symbolic algebra to represent and solve linear equations is one of the expectations within the "Algebra" content standard for the 6-8-grade band in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) "Principles and Standards for School Mathematics" (2000). Students' understanding of these concepts, even before a formal algebra course,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate verbal working memory processing both before and after providing semantically elaborated training sentences designed to enhance memory for symbol-word (visual-verbal) pairs. Abilities of 20 children diagnosed with Reading Disorder (RD) and 20 age-matched peers who were normally achieving in reading (NA)…

Describes a computer-based methodology that obtains simple timed responses to sets of words and word-like nonsense items, then presents pilot data depicting estimated vocabulary knowledge and relating it to word frequency and decision response time. (FL)

Examines differences in secondary students' vocabulary learning from original and revised contextual information. Finds that the revised passages generated significantly higher scores for both ability groups on the definition and importance measures but not on the indication of knowledge measure. (MG)