Readers often struggle to identify the main ideas in expository texts. Existing research and instruction provide some guidance on how to encourage readers to identify main ideas. However, there is substantial variability in how main ideas are operationalized and how readers are prompted to identify main ideas. This variability hinders…

Many digital reading applications have built-in features to control the presentation flow of texts by segmenting those texts into smaller linguistic units. Whether and how these segmentation techniques affect the readability of texts is largely unknown. With this background, the current study examined a recent proposal that a sentence-by-sentence…

Inferential comprehension is necessary to connect ideas in a text together in a meaningful manner. There have been multiple studies on inferential comprehension involving texts of different genres (narrative and expository), but not a coherent overview of the findings of inferential comprehension by genre. The purpose of this study is to provide a…

Several researchers emphasize the role of the writer's topic knowledge for writing. In academic writing topic knowledge is often constructed by studying source texts. One possibility to support that essential phase of the writing process is to provide interactive learning questions which facilitate the construction of an adequate situation…