Educators and researchers have been interested in supporting sentence-level language comprehension for struggling readers, but it has been challenging to research. To investigate the properties of sentences that might be useful targets for future research in instruction and assessment, we coded several features of the items in a computer-adaptive…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the duration of students' augmented reality (AR) experience on reading comprehension and cognitive load in reading activities carried out with an augmented reality storybook. The participants are 134 secondary school students aged between 11 and 12 attending a school in Antalya. They were…

Assessing the difficulty of reading comprehension questions is crucial to educational methodologies and language understanding technologies. Traditional methods of assessing question difficulty rely frequently on human judgments or shallow metrics, often failing to accurately capture the intricate cognitive demands of answering a question. This…

Inference-making is a central element of successful reading comprehension, yet provides a challenge for beginning readers. Text decoding takes up cognitive resources which prevents beginning readers from successful inference-making and compromises reading comprehension. Listening does not require any decoding and could therefore offer a less…

Background: Collaborative reading can facilitate students' understanding of complex learning materials. High-quality annotations provided by peer learners are essential for successful collaborative reading. However, it remains to be understood how annotation quality affects reading comprehension. Objectives: A simulated collaborative reading…

This study reviews the effect of comprehension and perceived text difficulty in promoting reading enjoyment and interest to read more among novice learners practicing extensive and pleasure reading. Sixty-seven college students in their first semester of Spanish were asked to read a children-like story picture book in Spanish and were then given…

The aim of this article is to assist TESOL learners in effectively delving into professional literature for both their coursework and future teaching endeavors. It begins by addressing common challenges in critical reading faced by TESOL students, such as complex and technical language, varied writing styles and a lack of familiarity with TESOL…

Mayer (2017, 2020) proposed three major design features of computer-assisted instructions (CAI) within the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning: reducing extraneous processing (i.e., excluding irrelevant content), managing essential processing (i.e., focusing on the complex but essential learning materials), and fostering generative processing…

The present contribution illuminates the initial developments in the adoption of Complex Instruction in Germany, where the implementation of the approach has just begun. It gives insights into a teacher education project, a theatre project, and a planned project at secondary schools.

The purpose of this study was to compare the functioning of five restrictive CDMs, including DINA, DINO, A-CDM, LLM, and RRUM, against the G-DINA model to identify the best-fitting CDM which can better explain the interaction underlying the attributes of the reading comprehension section of an Iranian high-stakes language proficiency test. To this…

Test development is a complicated process that demands examining various factors, one of them being writing items of varying difficulty. It is important to use items of a different range of difficulty to ensure that the test results accurately indicate the test-taker's abilities. Therefore, the factors affecting item difficulty should be defined,…

The effectiveness of English Language Teaching (ELT) materials significantly influences the learning outcomes of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, positioning these resources as cardinal in the acquisition process. Despite this widely acknowledged significance, there remains a notable gap in research concerning the evaluation of key…

Studies relating to the vocabulary items within EFL textbooks have revealed a divergence from well-researched wordlists such as the New General Service List (NGSL) (Browne et al., 2013), and the BNC/COCA wordlist (Nakayama, 2022; Sun and Dang, 2020). In Japan, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) recently…

Audiobooks allow language learners to read and listen to the same text simultaneously; yet the effects of this bimodal input (written and spoken) on learners' comprehension have been inconsistent, suggesting that the conditions under which audiobooks can help comprehension are not well understood. As such, I explored silent reading speed and text…

Research Findings: Anthropomorphized animal characters have been associated with negative influences on educational outcomes for young children, for example story comprehension and prosocial learning from moral tales. In this study we investigate how character realism and moral theme influence young children's recall of the story content. Retells…