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;…

Infographics are a new type of reading material comprising textual and visual information that has been used worldwide. Nonetheless, there has been limited research investigating people's infographic-reading performance and the characteristics of superior readers. This study adopted Chinese texts and infographics as materials and employed…

The importance of having a highly qualified teacher in every classroom is an educational necessity. Determining which teacher characteristics define teacher quality and measuring their impact on student outcomes has offered mixed results. This study explored the effect of teachers' knowledge of language and literacy on their students' reading…

Prior studies suggest that teaching reading strategies promotes reading comprehension in adolescents who have difficulties with reading comprehension, yet the results of those studies are mixed. Individual differences in students' vocabulary knowledge may explain these mixed results. This article examines to what extent vocabulary knowledge…

This study examined the direct and indirect relations of foundational language skills (vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and orthographic knowledge), higher-order cognitive skills (inference making and comprehension monitoring), and word reading to reading comprehension in Chinese. Consistent with the hierarchical relations specified in the Direct…

This study examined the relationship between knowledge of academic vocabulary and reading comprehension in data contributed by 5855 middle school students. Each student completed an academic vocabulary assessment, a standardized reading comprehension test, and one of four types of novel vocabulary-depth measures. "Multiword expressions"…

Teachers' knowledge of reading comprehension processes is under-researched relative to teachers' knowledge of word identification and phonological awareness. In this study, sixty-two pre- and inservice upper-elementary and middle school English language arts, science, and social studies teachers completed in-depth interview protocols eliciting…

Constructing a knowledge representation from multiple texts requires the integration of information across texts. The aim of the current study was to investigate how elementary school students integrate information across multiple text passages and, particularly, whether students use information from a prior text to improve understanding of a…

This study explored the role of vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness in reading comprehension ability of Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) learners. One hundred ninety five CHL students participated in this study and completed a series of measures including two sets of vocabulary knowledge (one consisting of items pertaining to…

A core tenet of the model of domain learning is that learning is shaped by cognitive and motivational forces. In writing, these catalysts include learners' knowledge, motivation, strategic behaviors, and skills. This study tested this proposition at two time points (Fall and Spring) with 179 fifth-grade students (52% were girls), examining if…

We examined the influence of teachers' use of instructional time on students' learning within the context of a randomized controlled trial investigating the effects of a content-area reading comprehension intervention. Participants were 8th grade social studies teachers who had their classes randomly assigned to either Promoting Acceleration of…

The Component Model of Reading expanded upon the Simple View of Reading by adding an ecological and psychological component. Elements of the ecological component include teacher knowledge, information provided in textbooks, and teacher instructional practices. In this study, the authors examined the extent of teacher knowledge about text…

The present study investigated whether text structure inference skill (i.e., the ability to infer overall text structure) has unique predictive value for expository text comprehension on top of the variance accounted for by sentence reading fluency, linguistic knowledge and metacognitive knowledge. Furthermore, it was examined whether the unique…

The present study aimed to examine the role of logical reasoning in the relation between lexical quality and reading comprehension in 146 fourth grade Dutch children. We assessed their standardized reading comprehension measure, along with their decoding efficiency and vocabulary as measures of lexical quality, syllogistic reasoning as measure of…

Previous research has documented the role of readers' existing topic knowledge in supporting students' comprehension of text; yet, we know less about how to build students' knowledge in order to support comprehension and vocabulary learning. In the current study, we test the hypothesis that knowledge can be built and leveraged simultaneously in…