The deep cloze test was developed by Jensen and Elbro (Read Writ Interdiscip J 35(5):1221-1237, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10230-w) to assess reading comprehension at the level of global situational understanding. In two independent studies, we examined potential contributors to students' scores on the deep cloze reading…

The current study examined the occurrence and benefits of linguistic alignment in two modalities, face-to-face (FTF) and synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), focusing on stranded prepositions in relative clauses. It further examined how learner characteristics (i.e., working memory, language proficiency, previous knowledge of the…

This study investigated the effect of cloze item practice on reading comprehension, where cloze items were either created by humans, by machine using natural language processing techniques, or randomly. Participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 302) took a pre-test, read a text, and took part in one of five conditions, Do-Nothing, Re-Read,…

Learners' academic self-concepts and attributions have been widely evidenced to substantially regulate their educational development. Developmentally, they will not only operate in a mutually reinforcing manner. Rather, self-concepts will directly affect learners' outcome attributions in a particular academic setting. Current research in the…

Reading research in K-12 English-speaking contexts reveals that inferential and expository texts cause substantial difficulty for students but less such research exists regarding other languages. It was the purpose of this quantitative cloze-based study to expose any relationship between student difficulty and particular features of the Arabic…

This study aims at measuring the amount of the effect of the reader's background knowledge on performance in reading comprehension tests through the assessment of information gained in reading comprehension (RC) tests across-four testing techniques, short answer questions ,true-false items, multiple-choice items, and cloze test and re-test. This…

This study explores differences in students' reading comprehension of International Financial Reporting Standards in a South African financial reporting class with a heterogeneous student cohort. Statistically significant differences were identified for prior academic performance, language of instruction, first language and enrolment in the…

Based on the schema theory, it has been found that the background knowledge of males and females differs. This difference in background knowledge can affect the students' reading comprehension. In Iran, although boys and girls study in different schools, they follow the same curricula and syllabuses in all the schools. The present article reports…

The study examined the effects of cultural familiarity with a text on Chinese students' reading comprehension performance and reading time. In the first phase of the study, participants were required to read a culturally familiar text, write down the time they spent reading the passage, and immediately complete a cloze test without referring back…

This article describes three potential English literacy problem areas for Asian graduate students. The three areas are: (1) the influence of cultural and personal prior knowledge, (2) the processes of education that students learned in their native schools, and (3) the linguistic characteristics of ESL students. Instructional ideas are provided…