Twenty-first century literacy includes a mixture of digital and print literacy skills and strategies. AutoTutor for Adult Reading Comprehension is a web-based intelligent tutoring system that is designed to help adult learners develop effective reading comprehension strategies. Lessons span basic reading skills (vocabulary, word parts),…

Twenty-first century literacy includes a mixture of digital and print literacy skills and strategies. AutoTutor for Adult Reading Comprehension is a web-based intelligent tutoring system that is designed to help adult learners develop effective reading comprehension strategies. Lessons span basic reading skills (vocabulary, word parts),…

Morphological knowledge refers to an individual's understanding of the structure and meaning of words based on their familiarity with morphemes (i.e., word parts, including prefixes, suffixes, and bases). This knowledge is crucial to developing various aspects of language and literacy to successfully function in 21st century education and…

Use of the term Background knowledge, in conjunction with Reading Comprehension, has become convoluted and vague over the past several decades of research. Showing the abundance of uses of the term in multiple domains and disciplines has relegated it to being an automatic inclusion in key notes and conclusions of research on the topic of improving…

With the growing number of non-native English speakers, improving communication through direct vocabulary instruction (DVI) is important. The problem investigated in this study was that English as a second language (ESL) teachers were not using the strategy DVI, in the ESL classroom. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore ESL…

This study investigated the effect of LWR and the level of passage difficulty on L2 reading comprehension. Five upper intermediate ESL students were exposed to four different treatment combinations of silent reading and LWR with low and high intrinsic load reading passages. Reading comprehension was measured by immediate recall protocol. Under the…

Using self-paced reading, the present study compared native English and adult L1-Korean-L2-English speakers' processing behaviors during online comprehension of underinformative scalar sentences and non-scalar sentences like "Some/All elephants have trunks and ears." Results indicate that native speakers showed online sensitivity (i.e.…

This paper describes a novel automated disengagement tracing system (DTS) that detects mind wandering in students using AutoTutor, an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) with conversational agents. DTS is based on an unsupervised learning method and thus does not rely on any self-reports of disengagement. We analyzed the reading time and response…

This study explored the role of early oral language in reading development among adult heritage language (HL) learners to provide insights into the possible developmental pattern of HL reading development. One hundred and ninety-five English-speaking Chinese HL (CHL) students participated in this study. They completed a language background survey…

Facing the demands of the pandemic and distance learning, English learners require educational technologies that are accessible, engaging, and effective. Meeting these demands requires educational technology developers to consider learners' sociocultural contexts. Learning theories can be applied to meet individuals' needs to optimize chances for…

Open Educational Resources (OER) aim to provide equal access to education. Yet, as the language level used in OER presents a barrier to many learners, there is a need to make these resources more comprehensible. This study combined eye-tracking methodology and comprehension assessment to explore the effect of text simplification on English second…

This quantitative study focuses on online metacognitive reading strategies used by 39 Iranian postgraduate students with internal and external locus of control. The students were selected through locus of control questionnaire and it is followed by OSORS questionnaire to measure online metacognitive strategies used by students. The results of…

We developed a version of AutoTutor that helps struggling adult learners improve their comprehension strategies through conversational agents. We hypothesized that the accuracy and time to answer questions during the conversation could be diagnostic of their mastery of different reading comprehension components: words, textbase, situation model,…

After developing an intelligent tutoring system (ITS), or any other class of learning environments, one of the first questions that should be asked is whether the system was effective in helping students learn the targeted skills or subject matter. In this study, we employed two educational data mining models (Additive Factor Model, AFM and…

Adaptive learning technologies hold great promise for improving the reading skills of adults with low literacy, but adults with low literacy skills typically have low computer literacy skills. In order to determine whether adults with low literacy skills would be able to use an intelligent tutoring system for reading comprehension, we adapted a 44…