In university settings, writing argumentative essays from reading conflicting source texts is a common task for students. In performing this synthesis task, they must deal with conflicting claims about a controversial issue as they develop their own positions. Argumentative synthesis is characterized by writers' back-and-forth moves between…

This dissertation explored how effectively first-year writing (FYW) evaluated and selected sources for their researched writing assignments. Though students were taught how to access sources from the library and offered sources on the course management system, most often they obtained sources via the open internet. As mis- and disinformation…

High-stakes reading tests significantly influence one's future success, leading many second language learners to engage in intensive test preparation. This study examines nine TOEFL reading preparation lectures from two popular cram schools, or [foreign characters omitted] "hagwons," in Korea, with a total duration of five hours and…

In Taiwan, the education system places a strong emphasis on higher education. Students who perform well in the National High School Entrance Examination are given priority admission to public high schools, while those with lower scores tend to enroll in vocational schools. It's worth noting that students with low scores in this examination often…

Extensive Reading (ER) emerges as a promising approach for acquiring a foreign language, allowing for a large amount of language exposure. However, the influence of supplementary activities within ER programs has yet to be thoroughly investigated, despite previous studies suggesting their potential effectiveness. This research investigated the…

We report on a meta-analysis designed to test the theory that instruction that involves direct teaching of academic vocabulary and teaching strategies to determine the meaning of unknown words develops students' abilities to infer new words' meanings and builds students' overall vocabulary knowledge. We meta-analyzed 39 experimental and…

The current study set out to investigate the effects of concurrent group dynamic assessment (GDA) and cumulative GDA on Iranian EFL learners' development of reading comprehension micro-skills. To this end, a convenience sample of 60 intermediate undergraduate EFL university students that were selected based on the results of a placement test and…

This study examined incremental change for several reading component skills while adolescents were actively learning a word-level intervention and measured pre-/postintervention change in skills. Six ninth graders in two different classes participated during the 2019-2020 academic year. Primary analysis was based on an A-B single-case design…

While debate on declines in children's literacy is ongoing in Aotearoa New Zealand, very little attention in research and policy is paid to reading enjoyment and its capacity to support the reading development of children. Developed alongside a series of studies on children's reading for pleasure this article makes a theoretically informed…

The curricular reform of 2016 presented us with a unique opportunity to compare children who had followed the previous early childhood curriculum in Slovakia with children who attended preschool after the successful implementation of the new preschool curriculum. Our book is based on the findings of research carried out in the ecologically valid…

Based on 52 studies with samples mostly from English-speaking countries, the current study used Bayesian network meta-analysis to investigate the intervention effectiveness of different reading comprehension strategy combinations on reading comprehension among students with reading difficulties in 3rd through 12th grade. We focused on commonly…

Research Findings: In this study, we examined the short- and long-term effects of Reading Express, a home-visiting intervention in which volunteers encourage low socio-economic status and ethnic minority parents to engage in interactive shared reading with their child. Outcomes of a quasi-experiment involving 176 children in the Netherlands (mean…

Reading a word requires several component processes. The dual route cascaded (DRC) model provides a characterization of these component processes and their involvement in different reading routes. We tested how relevant precursor skills associated with these component processes predict the use of the sublexical and lexical route in beginning…

The associations among readers' cognitive skills (general cognitive ability, reading skills, and attentional functioning), task demands (easy versus difficult questions), and process measures (total fixation time on relevant and irrelevant paragraphs) was investigated to explain task-oriented reading accuracy and efficiency (number of scores in a…

Purpose: Graded readers can help English language learners to improve their reading ability. Literary texts with simplified language often differ from expository texts for teaching EFL learners. Although reading strategies have been used to facilitate comprehension, how students use strategies to process literary texts is underexplored. The…