Although links between knowledge and reading comprehension have been widely documented for decades, recent translational science publications (e.g., teacher journals, books, and podcasts) have increasingly referred to studies using baseball (a sport popular in the USA) as a proxy for knowledge to explain those links, especially within science of…

Lexical coverage, i.e. the extent to which words in a text are known, is considered an important predictor of reading comprehension, with studies suggesting 98% lexical coverage leads to adequate comprehension. However, no studies to date have examined how the various lexical coverage percentages suggested in the literature are reflected by the…

This study investigates how working memory (WM) capacity and L2 linguistic knowledge affect L2 literal and inferential reading comprehension, considering the presence or absence of background knowledge. Eighty upper-intermediate to advanced adult English learners participated, completing tasks to assess WM capacity, background knowledge, L2…

Reading comprehension instruction was identified by the National Reading Panel as an effective instructional practice to improve students' reading comprehension. Teacher professional development (PD) is essential for effective reading comprehension instruction to occur in schools. The aim of this meta-analysis is to examine the extent to which…

Internet users are bombarded with information and need strategies to evaluate its trustworthiness. Expert fact-checkers rely on lateral reading, which involves investigating sources, finding better coverage, and tracing information back to original contexts. This study contrasted college students' preference for and use of lateral reading to…

Background: Young children clearly know quite a bit about the conventions of written language; for instance, 5-year-old children are sensitive to the fact that words tend to include both consonants and vowels, rather than just one or the other. The core theoretical debate lies in whether this understanding of sub-lexical orthographic regularities…

Vocabulary is a prominent contributor to reading comprehension. However, little is known about how students with disabilities with lower vocabulary performance respond to Tier 1 instruction, or how their vocabulary knowledge relates to their content acquisition. To examine the differential impact of Tier 1 instruction for U.S. middle school…

Reading comprehension is among the most challenging and complex skills to teach and research. Doing both well is critical to improving the reading comprehension proficiency of 67% of grade 4 students in U.S. public schools who scored below basic on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress. This Chapter presents Knowledge Acquisition…

With a focus on content-area reading, this study aimed to (a) understand the sources and prevalence of concurrent and specific difficulties in word-level skills, vocabulary, and knowledge among adolescent struggling readers (ASRs) and (b) explore the relations among reading skills, profiles, and reading comprehension. A dual-measure screening…

Grammatical and vocabulary knowledge (i.e., breadth and depth) are widely acknowledged as key predictors of reading comprehension in a second language (L2). However, it remains unclear how different aspects of vocabulary depth may independently contribute to L2 reading comprehension and how learners' proficiency may moderate the relative…

Readers build a mental representation of text during reading. The coherence building processes readers use to build a mental representation during reading is key to comprehension. We examined the effects of self- explanation on coherence building processes as undergraduates (n =51) read five complementary texts about natural selection and…

Guided by the Simple View of Reading (SVR considers reading comprehension as a product of decoding and listening comprehension) and the self-teaching hypothesis applied to Chinese (Li et al. in Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 24(3):252-263), this research examined (1) whether the SVR is applicable to L2 morphosyllabic Chinese;…

For successful learning, students need to evaluate their learning status relative to their learning goals and regulate their study in response to such monitoring. The present study investigated whether making metacognitive judgments on previously studied text would enhance the learning of that studied (backward effect) and newly studied text…

Dyslexic children often fail to correct errors while reading aloud, and dyslexic adolescents and adults exhibit lower amplitudes of the error-related negativity (ERN)--the neural response to errors--than typical readers during silent reading. Past researchers therefore suggested that dyslexia may arise from a faulty error detection mechanism that…

The present ex post facto correlational research is aimed at exploring the relationship between grammar and vocabulary knowledge components in L2 reading comprehension. The study focuses on two cohorts of EFL students with different proficiency levels: more proficient (\MP) and less proficient (LP). Two dimensions of grammar knowledge are…