Background: South African township learners are known to perform poorly in international tests, including reading and science. Language is a complicating variable as English, the learners' second language (L2), is generally the language of learning and teaching, including for reading science texts. Aim: The study's objectives were to determine the…

In this paper, we discuss the results of a case study about the teaching strategies used by three primary school educators to decode Grade 4 science terminology. In South Africa, the study of science is formally introduced to learners in Grade 4. Additionally, Grade 4 is the year when learners transition from being taught in their native languages…

Two groups of freshman students, enrolled in a Vocabulary I and Reading I courses, participated in the study. Before instruction, both groups took a recognition (vocabulary) and a production (oral reading) pre-test. Comparisons of the pre-test scores showed no significant differences between the experimental and control group in decoding skills…

The effects of a word identification game aimed at enhancing decoding efficiency in poor readers were tested. Following a pretest-posttest-retention design with a waiting control group, 62 poor-reading Dutch second graders received a five-hour tablet intervention across a period of five weeks. During the intervention, participants practiced…

This study investigated the relationship between syntactic comprehension at the sentence level and text-level comprehension. The study isolated the specific contribution of syntax by asking whether sentence comprehension efficiency of difficult syntactic constructions explained variance in text comprehension after controlling for sentence…

The first purpose of this study was to investigate whether the visuospatial working memory (VSWM) skills of 15-16-year-old pupils with difficulties in mathematics differ from those of their normally achieving peers. The goal was to broaden the view of the complex system of VSWM. A set of passive and active VSWM tasks was used. The study's second…

A set of four experiments investigates the relationship between phonological coding and reading ability, using a picture-word interference task and a decoding task. Results with regard to both adults and children suggest that while poor readers possess weak decoding skills, good and poor readers show equivalent evidence of direct semantic and…

The set of instructional materials included here consists of reading, writing, and language development worksheets to be used in adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) literacy education. Materials are grouped according to four themes; this volume contains units on theme 3 (diary writing) and theme 4 (study skills). Each unit contains an…