During reading, students construct mental models of what they read. Summaries can be used to evaluate the latent knowledge structure of these mental models. We used indices from Student Mental Model Analyzer for Research and Teaching (SMART) to explore the potential of a global index, Graph Centrality (GC), as a measure to describe mental model…

Learning new words is fundamental in both first and second-language reading. There are, however, divided opinions on the best instructional approaches. Two widely used approaches across languages are whole-word focus and word-constituent focus. The appropriateness of each approach has varied historically, even within a single language (e.g., the…

This article explores the close association between higher education and reading. I draw on the resources of literary studies to illuminate the phenomenon of educational 'engagement'. I explore the accounts of reading offered in the phenomenological literary theory of Rita Felski and Marielle Macé and extend their 'stylistics of existence' into…

This paper considers how an increased awareness of translation in the language classroom might impact the instruction of Comparative Literature, and literary studies more broadly. Despite the arguments for translation's centrality to the study Comparative Literature (Apter, 2006; Bassnett, 2006; Newman 2017) translation pedagogy is still…

Most people want to be able to read their reading materials quicker and remember them effectively. Covering a large quantity of reading materials at a normal speed requires much more time than is usually available. Good readers, however, can cover a lot of materials by identifying key elements of a sentence for key idea with the help of…

In this article, the authors, two teacher educators and three high school teachers, examine the impact of a professional development seminar held in spring 2017. In that seminar, participants read and composed brief autobiographical sketches in a variety of media and learned a new lexicon for multimodal close reading, composition, and design.…

The author of this thought-provoking article joins an impressive cohort of current commentators and scholars united in their concern over the state of the art of reading. Mostly, they are concerned with the sustained, silent, generally solitary process of reading in which the reader is deeply focused on and immersed in the text. Their fear is that…

With the increasing educational and institutional legitimacy afforded to multimodal texts, there is a need to further explore the use of the visual and its place in reader response, not only as a textual means to prompt interpretation but also as a form of interpretation itself. In this paper, I look at the multimodal interpretive practices of one…

In first-year writing (FYW), instructors want students to understand how reading texts in particular ways affects how and what they learn and, in turn, how and what they might communicate to their own readers. Because students tend to come to FYW predisposed to notice more visual aspects (e.g., headings, bulleted lists) than verbal aspects (e.g.,…

Learning often involves integration of information from multiple texts. The aim of the current study was to determine whether relevant information from previously read texts is spontaneously activated during reading, allowing for integration between texts (experiment 1 and 2), and whether this process is related to the representation of the texts…

This article represents a literature review and interpretation pertaining to the role that metacognition is seen to play in student performance. It begins by providing evidence from research reported in the literature which indicates that not all students are able to accurately assess their capabilities, and suggests that this lack is linked to…

This article looks at the apparent paradox between the demand for strong writing skills and the lack of colleges of business that require their MBA students to complete writing courses. In the past, most approaches to teaching writing proved inadequate in producing graduates with the ability to write clearly, effectively, and efficiently. This…

The writing across the curriculum movement has rightfully gained recognition as a transformative force in how teachers conceive of, use, and assign writing in their classes throughout various disciplines. Drawing on data from the first three years of an ongoing study of faculty "WAC fellows" at a large, comprehensive state university,…

In this theoretical contribution, our purpose is to examine the nature of reading competence as it unfolds at the present and to project that nature into the future. More specifically, we ask what it will mean to be a competent reader for the 21st century and what combination of knowledge, beliefs, abilities, and processes that competence will…

Undergraduates (N = 171) completed a revised version of the Author Recognition Test (Stanovich & West, 1989). The resulting print exposure scores were divided into two dimensions: personal reading experience (primary print knowledge--PPK) and secondary print knowledge (SPK). Both PPK and SPK were correlated with print exposure, but not with…