PURPOSE To characterize the performance of students from the 5th year of primary school, with and without indicatives of reading and writing disorders, in receptive vocabulary and reading comprehension of sentences and texts, and to verify possible correlations between both. METHODS This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the institution (no. 098/13). Fifty-two students in...

Reading comprehension is one of the essential skills for learning in every language and in Iranian educational system, there seems a need to make some revisions in teaching reading comprehension. In an attempt to address this problem, this research set out to utilize Directed Reading –Thinking Activity (coined by Stauffer, 1969) as a teaching comprehension model which was expected to enhance st...

Finding appropriate, authentic reading materials is a challenge for language instructors. The Web is a vast resource of texts, but most pages are not suitable for reading practice, and commercial search engines are not well suited to finding texts that satisfy pedagogical constraints such as reading level, length, text quality, and presence of target vocabulary. We present a system that uses va...

English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) uses the results of needs analysis for curriculum development and materials production. ESAP courses should be based on students’ academic needs. Consequently, the present study investigated the English language needs of Iranian undergraduate students of Law. Participants included 218 undergraduate students, 33 graduate students, and 10 content teac...

With the advent of digital literacy, fluency in reading from the screen has become a key category in shaping reading proficiency. Furthermore, research focusing on digital reading fluency, especially in the English as Foreign Language (EFL) context, is scarce. Therefore, this study first seeks to explore the differences in the participants’ reading fluency in paper and digital reading environme...

This paper concerns learning information by reading natural language texts. The major aim is to develop representations which are understandable by a reasoning engine and can be used to answer questions. We use abduction for mapping natural language data into concise and speci c theories underlying the textual data. Techniques for automatically generating usable data representations are discuss...

Purpose – This paper aims to offer insights into the usability, acceptance and limitations of e-readers with regard to the specific requirements of scholarly text work. To fit into the academic workflow non-linear reading, bookmarking, commenting, extracting text or the integration of non-textual elements must be supported. Design/methodology/approach – A group of social science students were q...

Discussions concerning which literacy skills will be required of students in the 21st century have appeared in numerous educational publications recently and have been greeted with mixed reactions (Bellanca & Brandt, 2010; Trilling & Fadel, 2009). It has been proposed that the skills necessary to be a literate citizen in the new millennium have expanded from simply being able to read and write ...

There is a fact that most of the Secondary School students are still low in comprehending reading texts. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to see whether the use of KWL (Know, Want, Learned) strategy was effective in improving the students’ reading comprehension achievement in learning English as a Foreign Language. Non-equivalent groups pretest-posttest design was used in this st...