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BACKGROUND The purpose of this work was to collect construct and criterion-related evidence of validity for a reading comprehension test (TCL - Teste de Compreensão da Leitura) with three vertically scaled forms, designed to assess students from second, third and fourth grade. METHOD Two studies were conducted. In the first (n = 1,229), a confirmatory factor analysis was performed to analyse ...

This study reports on the development of a reading comprehension course based on Critical Pedagogy principles, and the result of its application on EFL learners' reading comprehension competence, their motivation to read English materials, their democratic attitudes towards their English classrooms, and also their attitudes towards the critical course. The present study is, in fact, a step forw...

Cloze was officially introduced in a journal on Journalism as a technique for estimating text readability and as "a new psychological tool for measuring the effectiveness of communication" (Taylor, 1953: 415). Different varieties of cloze have since been developed and experimented upon as measures of such diverse traits as reading comprehension and language proficiency. The findings of numerous...

Data are presented on the development of tests of reading skill for primary school pupils in rural Tanzania. Instruction in these schools is in Kiswahili, a regularly spelled language. Using a translation of a standard reading test, children can read aloud all words once they have learned the sound– letter correspondences, regardless of comprehension. In addition, children can pass traditional ...

The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between spelling knowledge and reading skills among a group of 16 intermediate-level Arab learners of English as a second language (ESL) and a corresponding comparison group of 21 intermediate-level ESL learners in an English for academic purposes (EAP) program. A spelling task was used to assess the English orthographic or spelling k...

Neuroscience has advanced our understanding of the neurological basis of reading disability (RD). Yet, no functional imaging work has been reported on the twice-exceptional dyslexic: individuals exhibiting both non-verbal-giftedness and RD. We compared groups of reading-disabled (RD), non-verbally-gifted (G), non-verbally-gifted-RD (GRD), and control (C) adults on validated word-rhyming and spa...

Recent studies have shown that chromogenic cephalosporin tests are inferior to disc zone edge tests in detecting penicillinase in Staphylococcus aureus isolates, resulting in a change to CLSI and EUCAST guidelines in 2012. We sought to confirm these findings using Australian isolates and compare the performance of the CLSI and EUCAST methods, which use different disc strengths, penicillin at 10...