Discourse cues (e.g., because, since, therefore, and so) express structural and semantic relationships between parts of an explanation, and are used extensively by human tutors. Previous research by Moser and Moore (in preparation) revealed patterns of cue occurrence, placement, and selection in the speech of expert tutors during tutorial dialogues. An experiment measuring both reading times an...

Researchers have shown that skilled readers use variety of strategies to comprehend written texts (Stanovich, 2000; Sweet & Snow, 2003). Hence many readers are not aware of reading strategies; there is a need of explicit teaching instruction to develop those strategies. In fact, in most English reading classes there is absence of teaching comprehension strategies to readers, the strategy usuall...

Previous studies have shown that underlining sentences while reading is an effective comprehension strategy that many people use spontaneously. We examined which components of this underlining strategy could facilitate comprehension. The effects on comprehension of lined traces and hand movement were examined independently. Eighty-two undergraduates were assigned to one of the four conditions: ...

The CLiMB project investigates semi-automatic methods to extract descriptive metadata from texts for indexing digital image collections. We developed a set of functional semantic categories to classify text extracts that describe images. Each semantic category names a functional relation between an image depicting a work of art historical significance, and expository text associated with the im...

Transactional theory represents one of the most significant frameworks for conceptualizing reading and writing developed in the twentieth century and continues to have a powerful influence on literacy researchers and practitioners. At the core of transactional theory is the notion that meaning is produced in the transaction of a reader with a text. In contrast with other models that “locate” me...

The CLiMB project investigates semi-automatic methods to extract descriptive metadata from texts for indexing digital image collections. We developed a set of functional semantic categories to classify text extracts that describe images. Each semantic category names a functional relation between an image depicting a work of art historical significance, and expository text associated with the im...

Recent research has shown that the subskills and text types affect reader performance considerably (Lumley, 1993, Dennis, 1982). Despite the fact that most reading tests consist of a variety of subskills and text types at the same time, the studies about the relative effects of both subskills and text types on readers’ performance are rare. In that vein, this article reports the relative effect...

Abstract Learning can be made more efficient when learners generate the to-be-learned text contents instead of passively receiving them. A multi-level meta-analysis was conducted to provide an overall estimate generation effect’s magnitude and identify theoretically practically relevant moderators. Overall, interventions improved learning with texts compared reading them (Hedges’ g = .41). This...

In this chapter I approach three automatic methods for the evaluation of summaries from narrative and expository texts in Spanish. The task consisted of correlating the evaluation made by three raters for 373 summaries with results provided by latent semantic analysis. Scores assigned by latent semantic analysis were obtained by means of the following three methods: 1) Comparison of summaries w...