The "ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines" serve as a roadmap for foreign/second language (L2) instruction, assessment, curriculum development, and textbook writing. However, very little research has investigated the validity claims of the "ACTFL Guidelines." This study empirically verifies the difficulty hierarchy suggested by…

In order to have a better understanding of the nature of reading behavior, it is quite essential to scrutinize the underlying assumptions of the two competing theories: the componential approach and unitary hypothesis and see how this is reflected on testing the reading skills. As a result, the current study was aimed at broadening the existing…

Learning loss pertains to the decline or regression in knowledge and abilities, as well as setbacks in academic advancement. This phenomenon typically arises from prolonged interruptions or gaps in the pupil's educational journey. Learning loss can be observed in diverse manifestations due to many factors. One example that can be illustrated is…

The Thai language, which is part of the Indo-Iranian language family, carries on rituals and local knowledge that have been passed down from generation to generation. The Thai National Statistics Office found that 10% of elementary school students in Thailand cannot read. This means that 90% of elementary school students in Thailand can read. The…

Oral language and early literacy skills are theorized to provide the foundation for reading acquisition. To understand these relations, methods are needed that depict dynamic skill development in the context of reading acquisition. We modeled contributions of school-entry skills and early skill trajectories to later reading with 105 5-year-old…

Reading anxiety measures are newly available in English, but none is available in Arabic. The goals of the present study were to adapt the English Reading Anxiety in College Students (RACS) scale to Arabic-speaking college students (RACS-Arabic), evaluate its reliability and other psychometric properties in comparison to the English US sample, and…

Previous studies show that linguistic information and talker information interact during processing. Familiarity with a language facilitates talker processing, and familiarity with a talker's voice facilitates linguistic processing. To probe the factors involved in talker processing, researchers examined how individual differences in reading…

While the close relationship between the brain system for speech processing and reading development is well-documented in alphabetic languages, whether and how such a link exists in children in a language without systematic grapheme-phoneme correspondence has not been directly investigated. In the present study, we measured Chinese children's…

The purpose of this study is to investigate if a mindfulness mandala coloring activity reduces a student's anxiety about reading. Reading is a fundamental skill for all other academic success, making proficient reading skills necessary. This study investigates if a reduction in a third grade student's reading anxiety results in changes to oral…

Little is known about what contributes to individual differences in reading fluency after accounting for accuracy. Previous research has shown individual differences in the relative growth in word and nonword reading, specifically a pattern in which students who start lower on reading grow more in word than nonword reading ability. The purpose of…

Based on recommendations from research, leaders in a north Texas public school district implemented social emotional learning (SEL) to address academic gaps among high residential mobility (HRM) students. Incorporating SEL instruction improves academic achievement 11 percentile points on average; however, in Adoniram School District (ASD), 2021…

Background: To examine levels of reading self-efficacy in college students and further understand sources that foster reading self-efficacy at the postsecondary level, there is a need for a valid scale that can be used for college student populations. Methods: In Phase 1, 160 items were generated and reviewed by a panel of experts and a group of…

Background and aims: Developmental disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and Developmental Dyslexia (DD) are reported to have more visual problems, oral language difficulties, and diminished reading skills in addition to their different diagnostic features. Moreover, these conditions…

In this article, I describe the challenges students faced in interpreting literary--or fictional--texts in the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement in the English learning area. I explain why it is important for students to learn how to interpret literary texts at school and consider why they might struggle with this important skill. I…

This study analyzes the impact of certain cognitive processes on word and pseudoword reading in languages with different orthographic consistency (Spanish and Arabic) in the first year of Primary Education. The study was conducted with a group of 113 pupils from Algeria and another group of 128 pupils from Ecuador, from a middle-class background…