This study develops a living history model, supported by digital history textbooks, to enhance students' historical empathy in history learning, aligning with the characteristics of Generation Z. Historical empathy refers to the ability to understand and reflect on differences in historical perspectives in depth. This study aims to design a living…

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…

Empirical research has shown that poor comprehenders use reading strategies less frequently than good comprehenders. Moreover, poor comprehenders tend to use simple strategies (e.g. slowing down reading when the text is hard to understand) instead of using more complex strategies (e.g. choosing between main and trivial information). The present…

Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

This paper examines links between perfect rhymes and text readability and decoding using a measure of English rhymes called the Perfect Rhymes Dictionary (PeRDict). PeRDict is based on the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary (the CMUdict) and provides rhyme counts for ~48,000 words in English and for the most frequent 1,000, 2,500,…

This study examined the effects of watching gestures and lip movement on second language (English) listening comprehension. The participants were 30 high and 22 low proficient learners of English. There were six listening tasks combining two variables: modality and difficulty. The modality consisted of three types of assessments: Body (the upper…

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…

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…

In this research, a mixed-method approach was employed to conduct large-scale eye-tracking measurements, traditionally associated with high costs and extensive time commitments. Utilizing consumer-grade webcams in conjunction with open-source software, data was collected from an expansive cohort of students, thereby demonstrating the scalability…

This study aimed to compare the readability levels of the reading passages in the General Aptitude Test (GAT) and those of English textbooks for the Upper Secondary Level in Thailand. The corpus of the General Aptitude Tests (C-GAT) was compiled from 70 reading passages on GAT test papers from 2009-2021, and the corpus of English textbooks (C-ET)…

Online anti-vaccine articles contribute to the anti-vaccine movement, which leads to recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. Previous studies indicate that anti-vaccine articles are easy to read and understand, which may increase their abilities to engage viewers. The present study aims to examine if readability levels are related to…

Instant feedback plays a vital role in promoting academic achievement and student success. In practice, however, delivering timely feedback to students can be challenging for instructors for a variety of reasons (e.g., limited teaching resources). In many cases, feedback arrives too late for learners to act on the advice and reinforce their…

Recent research studies have shown that increased letter spacing has a positive effect on the reading ability of dyslexic individuals. This study aims to investigate the effect of spacing on the readability of different fonts for children with and without dyslexia. Results did not support the hypothesis of better performance among children with…

Large language models (LLMs) offer an opportunity to make large-scale changes to educational content that would otherwise be too costly to implement. The work here highlights how LLMs (in particular GPT-4) can be prompted to revise educational math content ready for large scale deployment in real-world learning environments. We tested the ability…

Comparing language tests and test preparation materials holds important implications for the latter's validity and reliability. However, not enough studies compare such materials across a wide range of indices. Therefore, this study investigated the text complexity of IELTS academic reading tests (IRT) and IELTS reading practice tests (IRPrT).…