The aim of this study was to present a new working memory test following the line of work started by García-Madruga et al. (2007) and to examine its relation to reading comprehension and propositional reasoning measures. In that study we designed a new working memory span test--based on Daneman & Carpenter's (1980) Reading Span Test (RST)--in which the processing task called for an inferential ...

this study seeks to examine how teachers’ educational background (those who have educated in tefl in comparison to those who have educated in literature) may influence their beliefs and attitudes on language learning, teaching and the teaching methods they apply in their classes. on a general basis, depending on teachers’ opinion, learning process might be seen as behavioristic, inductive, inte...

________________ One of the most common findings of recent reading research is that drawing inferences is an essential part of the comprehension process, even among young children (Anderson & Pearson, 1984). Dole et al (1991) argues that inference is at the heart of comprehension process. As they construct their own models of meaning for a given text, readers and listeners alike use inferencing...

We describe a method used in the REAP tutor to automatically check whether students are reading practice texts for English vocabulary learning. The number of texts used by the REAP tutor and challenges of automatically generating reading comprehension questions necessitated a simpler type of question that could be computer-generated. We describe an algorithm for generating such reading-check qu...

portfolios as a means of constructivist learning appear to show great promise in enhancing diverse dimensions of learning and promoting learner motivation. this study is an investigation into the effectiveness of portfolio development on the reading comprehension and academic motivation of undergraduate students majoring in english literature in iran. in order to answer the research questions, ...

Can automatically generated questions scaffold reading comprehension? We automated three kinds of multiple-choice questions in children’s assisted reading: 1. Whquestions: ask a generically worded What/Where/When question. 2. Sentence prediction: ask which of three sentences belongs next. 3. Cloze: ask which of four words best fills in a blank in the next sentence. A within-subject experiment i...

The purpose of the present study was to investigate and rank order by importance the contributions of various cognitive predictors to reading comprehension in third, seventh, and tenth graders. An exploratory factor analysis revealed that for third grade, the best fit was a four-factor solution including Fluency, Verbal Reasoning, Nonverbal Reasoning, and Working Memory factors. For seventh and...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the comparative effect of using electronic short story books and traditional printed texts on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. For that purpose, ninety female learners ranging in age between fifteen and thirty five sat for the language proficiency test (PET, 2009) as the test of homogeneity and consequently sixty students were selected based on t...

One important task in Natural Language Understanding is Reading Comprehension. Given a piece of text, we want to be able to answer any relevant questions. Using Stanford Question Answering Dataset(SQuAD), which is a new reading comprehension dataset consisting of 100,000+ questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles, we built a reading comprehension model that attains 75.2% F1...