in most general and special english courses of the iranian universities, reading comprehension is the main component of the syllabus. nonetheless, in an attempt to improve listening and speaking skills, some general english courses were accompanied by oral presentations, according to which each student had to give a lecture lasting for nearly 10 minutes. the main objective was to investigate th...

Children with reading difficulties often demonstrate weaknesses in working memory (WM). This research study explored the relation between two WM systems (verbal and visuospatial WM) and reading ability in a sample of school-aged children with a wide range of reading skills. Children (N = 157), ages 9-12, were administered measures of short-term memory, verbal WM, visuospatial WM, and reading me...

The ability to detect fluctuation in students’ comprehension of text would be very useful for many intelligent tutoring systems. The obvious solution of inserting comprehension questions is limited in its application because it interrupts the flow of reading. To investigate whether we can detect comprehension fluctuations simply by observing the reading process itself, we developed a statistica...

The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between metacognitive reading strategies, reading self-efficacy, and reading comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. The participants were 119 Iranian B.A and M.A students majoring in English at Imam Khomeini International University and Islamshahr Azad University. A Michigan Test of English language Proficiency was given to the par...

This study investigated the cognitive and linguistic factors presumed to be associated with adult comprehension of figurative language, including age, working memory (WM), figurative language type, and reading comprehension (RC). Forty younger (M = 22 years) and 40 older (M = 63 years) healthy African American adults completed WM and reading tasks, and the 60-item forced-choice multiple-categor...

This study investigated the effect of cultural orientation on reading comprehension andachievement motivation of the EFL learners. To conduct this study, the researcher recruited 60Iranian EFL learners at language institutes. All learners were selected from the intermediate level.They were assigned to two groups; experimental and control groups. The researcher used a numberof cultural concepts ...

abstract this study scrutinized the interaction between linguistic and strategic variables in reading comprehension test performance of iranian efl learners. to this end, the interaction among the participants’ reading comprehension test performance, use of test-taking strategies, and level of language proficiency was analyzed. the participants comprised 286 students who answered a reading comp...

Does the reader comprehend the text because the reader is able or because the text is easy? Localizing the cause of comprehension in either the reader or the text is fraught with contradictions. A proposed solution uses a Rasch equation to models comprehension as the difference between a reader measure and text measure. Computing such a difference requires that reader and text are measured on a...

The role of spelling recognition was examined in word reading skills and reading comprehension for dyslexic and nondyslexic children. Dyslexic and nondyslexic children were matched on their raw word reading proficiency. Relationships between spelling recognition and the following were examined for both groups of children: verbal ability, working memory, phonological measures, rapid naming, word...