The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of prior knowledge and text structure on cognitive processes during comprehension of scientific texts. To investigate the processes online, we used a think-aloud methodology in Experiment 1 and a reading time methodology in Experiment 2. In both experiments, we obtained offline comprehension measures and measures of individual differen...

While it is hypothesized that providing instruction based on individuals’ preferred learning styles improves learning (i.e., reading for visual learners and listening for auditory learners, also referred to as the meshing hypothesis), after a critical review of the literature Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork (2008) concluded that this hypothesis lacks empirical evidence and subsequently des...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to examine whether different measures of oral reading fluency relate differentially to reading comprehension performance in two samples of second-grade students: (a) students who evidenced difficulties with nonsense-word oral reading fluency, real-word oral reading fluency, and oral reading fluency of connected text (ORFD), and (b) students who evidenced di...

We show how cognitive and educational research and theory from the areas of text comprehension and "active reading" strategies can be applied to the domain of hypermedia textbooks ("hyperbooks"). We describe our work on the MetaLinks system, which is an authoring tool and web-based server for adaptive hyperbooks. In this paper we describe how findings from text comprehension research are incorp...

This study, situated in an EFL context, aimed at discovering the ways purposes behind reading activities  influence  vocabulary  knowledge  gain  and  retrieval.  Seventy  five  elementary  learners of  English  were  randomly  assigned  to  three  groups  of  ‘free  reading’,  ‘reading  comprehension’ and ‘reading to summarize’. A modified text was administered to all the three groups. The dat...

The Reflective Tutorial Dialogue System (ReTuDiS) is an open learner modelling system for text comprehension. The system makes diagnosis of the learners’ cognitive profile and engages them in a reflective dialogue. In this paper we present the application of ReTuDiS for computer network text comprehension. Learners participate in a reflective dialogue concerning computer network topology. The d...

This study investigated textual and inter-textual reading of a group of Iranian EFL undergraduates’ careful English reading types. In this research, Khalifa and Weir’s (2009) reading framework was used to propose a more inclusive aspect of a careful reading framework and the reading construct for instructional and assessment goals. The participants of this study were B.A. students of English Tr...

Purpose In this initial article of the clinical forum on reading comprehension, we argue that reading comprehension is not a single ability that can be assessed by one or more general reading measures or taught by a small set of strategies or approaches. Method We present evidence for a multidimensional view of reading comprehension that demonstrates how it varies as a function of reader abil...

Two studies were conducted to measure the comprehensibility of synthetic speech with current text-tospeech technology. Baseline measurements for each subject were obtained using recorded natural speech. The first study was conducted in a quiet lab with no distractions. Half the subjects were allowed to take notes while listening, the other half were not. Findings showed that there was no signif...

EFL learners who loved to read newspapers but have difficulty in comprehending. Present paper is a study on the significance of special styles of newspapers’ writing that may contribute in decreasing reading and comprehension skills for EFL learners and also is primarily concerned with the language and style of newspaper reportage. Skilled readers don’t just read, they interact with the text. T...