The aim of this article is twofold. First, it provides a general overview of reading compre­hension by outlining classic models of single-text comprehension and more recent models of multiple-text comprehension and sourcing during reading comprehension. Second, the article highlights important sources of individual differences in reading…

In Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems, many previous works have studied group fairness using the demographic features of essay writers. However, individual fairness also plays an important role in fair evaluation and has not been yet explored. Initialized by Dwork et al., the fundamental concept of individual fairness is "similar people…

Paragraph structure has been identified as consisting of three distinct parts, which are the topic sentence, supporting sentences, and a paragraph ending sentence. Although topic sentences have been widely researched, similar consideration for paragraph endings has been less forthcoming. This discrepancy may be problematic as research suggests…

This paper takes a system dynamic approach to study homogeneous texts where the dynamics of the lexical richness of such texts over time are of the focal concern. It is hypothesized that the progress of the lexical complexity is driven by how far away this process is from the maximum level of complexity, while is subject to the fluctuations due to…

Metadiscourse studies, inspired by Halliday's interpersonal metafunction of language, have dominated academic discourse analysis. They tended to exclude the ideational metafunction in discourse and to reduce the reader/analyst to a concordance programme that scans texts for lists of pre-established, but not always clearly defined, linguistic…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

This study explores the views of doctoral students and supervisors about two doctoral thesis-writing models: the traditional monograph and the thesis that includes published articles in its body. Doctoral theses in biological and health sciences usually follow one of these two common models. Doctoral theses with publications are increasingly…

The deep comprehension of a text is tantamount to the construction of an articulated mental model of that text. The number of correct recollections is an index of a learner's mental model of a text. We assume that another index of comprehension is the timing of the gestures produced during text recall; gestures are simultaneous with speech when…

Text classification typically performs best with large training sets, but short texts are very common on the World Wide Web. Can we use resampling and data augmentation to construct larger texts using similar terms? Several current methods exist for working with short text that rely on using external data and contexts, or workarounds. Our focus is…

We address the challenging task of "computational natural language inference," by which we mean bridging two or more natural language texts while also providing an explanation of how they are connected. In the context of question answering (i.e., finding short answers to natural language questions), this inference connects the question…

Since the publication of the book Genre Analysis (CUP) by Swales (1990), many studies have focused on the study of the rhetorical organisation of different sections of research articles (RAs). The organisation of RA introductions has received most of the attention. However, the focus has generally been on the structure of introductions without…

Despite the importance of source attention and evaluation for learning from texts, little is known about the particular conditions that encourage sourcing during reading. In this article, basic assumptions of the discrepancy-induced source comprehension (D-ISC) model are presented, which describes the moment-by-moment cognitive processes that…

Julian of Norwich (1342-1416), was a Christian mystic whose writings, "Revelation of Love" and "A Book of Showings," are the earliest surviving texts in the English language written by a woman. The question that has puzzled scholars for centuries follows: How could a woman of her time express her vision in such innovative and…

We introduce a special issue featuring four theoretical models of multiple text comprehension. We present a central framework for conceptualizing the four models in this special issue. Specifically, we chart the models according to how they consider learner, texts, task, and context factors in explaining multiple text comprehension. In addition,…

Writing is an ever-creative artifice, elaborated in many different ways and used for many different purposes in different situations throughout history. From this perspective, each writer, embedded within a perceived sociohistoric moment, poses problems to solve, makes choices, and creates solutions from locally available resources and practices…