The purpose of this study is to examine readers’ comprehension as they develop their mental representation of reference in four sequential online texts. A total of 92 college students from three reading classes were recruited to complete the following steps in each text: (1) identify references, (2) draw the relationships between references, and (3) answer reading comprehension test items. Resu...

This study reports on the design of a computer system which helps English as a Foreign Language (EFL) college students construct a mental representation of reference in reading. Three modules, User Interface, Recording, and Feedback, are implemented. The feedback module compares students’ initial maps with that of an expert while students are constructing their mental maps. It then provides thr...

This paper examined validity evidence for the scores based on the Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA), an automated essay-scoring engine developed by Pearson Knowledge Technologies. A study was carried out using the validity framework described by Yang, et al. (2002). This framework delineates three approaches to validation studies: examine the relationship among scores given to the same essays by...

This study reports on our design of a computer system which supports the understanding of how students construct their mental representation of references and how the construction failures impede their reading comprehension. Three modules, User interface, Recording, and Feedback were implemented. The recording module traced all students’ reading process when they tried to link sentences togethe...

Bilingualism is commonly assumed to improve creativity but the mechanisms underlying creative acts, and the way these mechanisms are affected by bilingualism, are not very well understood. We hypothesize that learning to master multiple languages drives individuals toward a relatively focused cognitive-control state that exerts strong top-down impact on information processing and creates strong...

Recently tasks, as the basic units of syllabi, and the cognitive complexity, as the criterion for sequencing them, have caught many second language researchers’ attention. This study sought to explore the effect of utilizing the cognitively simple and complex tasks on high- and low-proficient EFL Iranian writers’ linguistic performance, i.e., fluency, accuracy, lexical complexity, and structura...

Reading, in any language, is a complex process. Reading in a second language is even more complicated because of the cross-linguistic influences that come from the reader’s two (or more) languages. In particular, cross-linguistic influences have been shown to affect word recognition processes. Much research has shown that properties of a reader’s first language, especially the writing system, c...

The work presented here is part of a larger study that looks at the impact that structured teaching materials have on improving orthographic skills. The first step is an analysis of the current status of linguistic structures in common primary readers (primers) since their key purpose is to lead children along a systematic learning path towards becoming proficient readers and writers. Using tex...

Previous studies have found that children with reading difficulties need more exposures to acquire the representations needed to support fluent reading than typically developing readers (e.g., Ehri and Saltmarsh, 1995). Building on existing orthographic learning paradigms, we report on an investigation of orthographic learning in poor readers using a new learning task tracking both the accuracy...

In this paper, we use the method of learning decomposition to study students’ mental representations of English words. Specifically, we investigate whether practice on a word transfers to similar words. We focus on the case where similar words share the same root (e.g., “dog” and “dogs”). Our data comes from Project LISTEN’s Reading Tutor during the 2003—2004 school year, and includes 6,213,289...