We report a study examining, for the first time, the effectiveness of engagement in dialogic argumentation in relation to its ability to promote integration of multiple source perspectives in an argumentive writing task after reading controversial multiple texts. Sixty-four primary school students engaged in a dialog-based intervention aiming to…

This article explores the affordances of employing an "affective lens" to document bilingual learners' engagement with texts. Drawing from a larger ethnographic study conducted in a sixth-grade classroom, I focus on the experiences of two emergent bilinguals and how their displays of affect provide insight into their complex sense-making…

According to the multidimensional view of reading comprehension (RAND), reading comprehension (RC) is influenced by three components?: the reader, text, and task. A broader perspective considers factors beyond the cognitive and linguistic dimensions and incorporates the contribution of emotional condition. The present study examined individual…

This study examined students' ability to select relevant ideas from multiple online texts and integrate those ideas in their written products. Students (N = 162) used a web-based platform to complete an online inquiry task in which they read three texts presenting different perspectives on computer gaming and wrote an article for a school magazine…

Background: We examined the influence of text and reader characteristics on sixth graders' inference generation. Methods: Eleven- to 12-year-old US monolingual English speakers (N = 71) and Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 81) read narrative and informational expository texts requiring an inference and answered an inference-tapping question after…

Assessing text quality as an indication of underlying skills still remains challenging; irrespective of the approach, many studies struggle with reliability or validity problems. If writing is considered problem-solving, a report must make the reader understand the described situation and call for its mental reconstruction. Therefore, text quality…

Despite recent calls to more fully incorporate multimodal perspectives into literacies research, there is still limited scholarship examining how students critically engage in reading activities by drawing on embodied practices. Racially and linguistically minoritized students are particularly disadvantaged by dominant logocentric and…

We examined sixth graders' detection of inconsistencies in narrative and expository passages, contrasting participants who were monolingual speakers (N = 85) or Spanish-English DLLs (N = 94) when recruited in pre-kindergarten (PK). We recorded self-paced reading times and judgments about whether the text made sense, and took an independent measure…

The purpose of the present study is to determine if there is a relationship between oral narrative production and the reading comprehension of expository text. The researcher measured both overall and component scores for expository text comprehension and oral narrative production ability of 40 typically-developing fifth grade students. Findings…

Helping students engage with complex texts has been a longstanding challenge, though teachers have received little guidance about practices that help students in engaging with texts. This paper provides a range of empirical evidence about a tool designed to provide formative insight into text-focused teaching, which we used to reliably score more…

Within Freedom Schools, the intellectual identities of academic achievement and success for Black children are fostered with positive cultural identity and social action as the foundation. This is partially accomplished with access to positive cultural messages in children's and young adult literature. The study in this article contributes to…

Text is the primary tool to learn disciplinary knowledge in school. Text-based learning is shaped by a complex interplay between the text and reader characteristics. This study examined the role of text structure and inhibition in conceptual learning about energy. Inhibition implies the ability to block dominant but inappropriate responses…

The aim of this study is to examine the effects of Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction on reading skills. The study group consisted of fifth-grade students. The quasi-experimental pretest-posttest comparison group design was used in the present study and a twenty-week study program was carried out. In the experimental intervention process, the…

Many studies have demonstrated the facilitating role of rhetorical devices in text comprehension, but there are also studies where rhetorical devices have not shown such effect. The present study sets out to explore whether readers' knowledge of rhetorical devices (that is, rhetorical competence) moderates their effectiveness beyond general…

Metacognitive monitoring skills are crucial for middle school students to improve academic performance and promote self-regulation. The current study examined the effect of social interaction on metacognitive monitoring training assessed by calibration accuracy measures and performance on comprehension items. Sixth-grade students (N = 84) assigned…