Two questions regarding text signals' influence on second language (L2) science expository text comprehension were examined. First, the contextual relationship between verbal headings and non-verbal underlining signals (i.e., related or unrelated) was manipulated to investigate how these verbal and nonverbal text signals influence L2 text…

Acquiring L2 Persian vocabulary is the main hurdle for foreign students who wish to pursue academic studies in Iranian universities. This study explored the effect of the cooperative learning approach and semantic mapping strategy on the acquisition of L2 Persian vocabulary. The study had a quasi-experimental design and included a control group…

By analysing the test data of 1029 British secondary school students' performance on 20 Programme for International Student Assessment English reading items through the generalised deterministic input, noisy "and" gate (G-DINA) model, the study conducted two investigations on exploring the relationships among the five reading…

The purpose of this study is to examine readers' comprehension as they develop their mental representation of reference in four sequential online texts. A total of 92 college students from three reading classes were recruited to complete the following steps in each text: (1) identify references, (2) draw the relationships between references, and…

This study reports on our design of a computer system which supports the understanding of how students construct their mental representation of references and how the construction failures impede their reading comprehension. Three modules, "User interface", "Recording", and "Feedback" were implemented. The…

The major purpose of this study is to assist college students in constructing mental representation of referential resolution in a computer system. Ninety students were asked to draw mental maps indicating the relationships between references, take reading comprehension tests, and fill out open-ended questionnaire. Results showed that the…

Presents the results of two studies where children were taught to identify textual cues, syntactic and semantic, in order to locate main ideas. The children also built graphic representations of these structures and were taught relevant questions to ask regarding comprehension. Results showed significant improvement, especially with older…

Describes a long-term project where middle school students were taught to visually represent key text ideas through idea-mapping techniques. Instruction was inserted in the content area curriculum along with regular textbooks and supplementary material. Positive effects were found in recall, comprehension, and learning. (MJP)