Cohesion plays an important role in science texts as their comprehension depends much on structural and textual signalling, which demonstrates the organisation of the text, the logical links of ideas, and the intended purpose of the writer. Particularly, research has shown that English learners (ELs) rely more on cohesive markers than their…

Frustrated by the generic statements that her Year 12 students were making about sources, Jacqueline Vyrnwy-Pierce resolved to undertake a research project into how her students were approaching sources about the French Revolution. Fascinated by the research of American educational psychologist Sam Wineburg, Vyrnwy-Pierce decided to use Wineburg's…

As an alternative solution to solve different reading comprehension problems in learning English as a foreign language (EFL), it is necessary to implement a blended learning model that combines both online and face-to-face (f2f) teaching modes. This study aimed at investigating the impact of blended learning on Iranian intermediate EFL learners'…

Age of acquisition (AoA) is a measure of word complexity which refers to the age at which a word is typically learned. AoA measures have shown strong correlations with reading comprehension, lexical decision times, and writing quality. AoA scores based on both adult and child data have limitations that allow for error in measurement, and increase…

The main purpose of this quantitative-qualitative content analysis study was to compare IELTS and TOEFL listening and reading tests based on the representation of the learning objectives of Revised Bloom's taxonomy. To this end, 12 Academic IELTS listening and reading tests and 12 TOEFL iBT listening and reading tests were analyzed qualitatively…

Foreign language educators have developed measures to assess the proficiency of U.S. high school learners. Most have compared language learners to clearly defined criteria for proficiency in the language (criterion-referenced assessment) or to the performance of other monolingual English speakers (norm-referenced assessment). In this study, the…

The present study sought to investigate the effect of podcasting on the listening comprehension skill of Iranian TEFL students at the Islamic Azad University of Shiraz. It also aimed to examine students' motivation towards the use of podcasts as a learning tool. To this end, two groups, an experimental and a control group (n = 30 in each group)…

The current study aimed to investigate the effects of providing instructions in L2 listening activities on the participants' performance in the classroom as well as the participants' views regarding the use of L1. The study included 48 students from the preparatory classes in the School of Foreign Languages, at a state university in Turkey.…

Purpose: We examined the effects of a text-processing reading comprehension intervention emphasizing listening comprehension and expressive language practices with middle school students with reading difficulties. Method: A total of 134 struggling readers in grades 6-8 were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 83) and control conditions (n = 51)…

Purpose: We examined the effects of a text-processing reading comprehension intervention emphasizing listening comprehension and expressive language practices with middle school students with reading difficulties. Method: A total of 134 struggling readers in grades 6-8 were randomly assigned to treatment (n = 83) and control conditions (n = 51)…

Background: Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit social cognitive impairments in the development of theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. ToM has been shown to relate to reading comprehension for children and adolescents with typical development (TD) and with ASD. This study…

The study examined the role of oral language skills in reading comprehension and listening comprehension levels of 125 monolingual (L1) and bilingual (L2) English-speaking learners (M = 121.5 months, SD = 4.65) in England. All testing was conducted in English. The L1 learners outperformed their L2 peers on the measures of oral language and text…

This study examined how machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) techniques can be leveraged to assess the interpretive behavior that is required for successful literary text comprehension. We compared the accuracy of seven different machine learning classification algorithms in predicting human ratings of student essays about…

This study examined how machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) techniques can be leveraged to assess the interpretive behavior that is required for successful literary text comprehension. We compared the accuracy of seven different machine learning classification algorithms in predicting human ratings of student essays about…

Repeated reading (RR) is a common fluency intervention, but recent studies comparing RR to continuous reading (CR; i.e., wide reading) found no significant differences in effects. This prompts the question of whether the mechanism that improves skills is repeatedly reading portions of connected text, or simply reading connected text. The current…