A significant positive correlation between higher metacognitive strategy use and better reading comprehension among native English-speaking children and adult learners of English as an additional language, consistently presented in the literature, has not been consistently or directly found among native English-speaking adult high school graduates…

Hu and Nation's (2000) study, which stipulated that second language (L2) readers need to be familiar with 98% of lexical items for adequate text comprehension, has become highly influential in L2 vocabulary research and pedagogy. However, the 98% critical threshold figure is based on findings from a research project in which a regression analysis…

Twenty-first century literacy includes a mixture of digital and print literacy skills and strategies. AutoTutor for Adult Reading Comprehension is a web-based intelligent tutoring system that is designed to help adult learners develop effective reading comprehension strategies. Lessons span basic reading skills (vocabulary, word parts),…

Twenty-first century literacy includes a mixture of digital and print literacy skills and strategies. AutoTutor for Adult Reading Comprehension is a web-based intelligent tutoring system that is designed to help adult learners develop effective reading comprehension strategies. Lessons span basic reading skills (vocabulary, word parts),…

Lexical ability, an umbrella term to cover various knowledge and skills pertaining to words in print, is a key component in reading comprehension. Little is known how different facets of lexical ability jointly contribute to L2 reading comprehension and how the contributions may differ between higher- and lower-proficiency L2 learners. This study,…

Morphological knowledge refers to an individual's understanding of the structure and meaning of words based on their familiarity with morphemes (i.e., word parts, including prefixes, suffixes, and bases). This knowledge is crucial to developing various aspects of language and literacy to successfully function in 21st century education and…

Use of the term Background knowledge, in conjunction with Reading Comprehension, has become convoluted and vague over the past several decades of research. Showing the abundance of uses of the term in multiple domains and disciplines has relegated it to being an automatic inclusion in key notes and conclusions of research on the topic of improving…

This article is written by two researchers and a teacher involved with the development and implementation of a web-based intelligent tutoring system for adults reading at elementary levels. A description of the tool is provided, followed by some of the challenges faced in designing, developing, and using the tool in adult literacy classrooms.

This study aimed to determine the relationship between environmental factors and elementary-school fourth-grade students' reading comprehension levels. In the research, the relational scanning model, one of the quantitative research methods, was applied. The research was conducted in Ankara in the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 academic years. The…

Underdeveloped reading comprehension skills can limit academic success; a particular challenge for English language learners (ELLs). The current study investigated whether a web-based text structure strategy, delivered via the Intelligent Tutoring of Structure Strategy (ITSS) program to adult Chinese ELLs, improved students' use of reading…

With the growing number of non-native English speakers, improving communication through direct vocabulary instruction (DVI) is important. The problem investigated in this study was that English as a second language (ESL) teachers were not using the strategy DVI, in the ESL classroom. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore ESL…

A large percentage of adults throughout the world have low reading skills. Computer technologies can potentially help these adults improve their literacy in addition to instructors at literacy centers. AutoTutor was designed to teach comprehension strategies by implementing conversational "trialogues" in which two computer agents (tutor…

This study investigated the relative contributions of English morphological and vocabulary knowledge to second language (L2) reading comprehension among 100 adult Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. The study also investigated the extent to which the roles of morphological and vocabulary knowledge in L2 reading comprehension…

This study scrutinized the effects of words' superiority, regularity, frequency and length on the intermediate and advanced EFL learner's visual word recognition. Moreover, it attempted to check whether each of these parameters could be statistically a significant predictor on recognition tasks. Accordingly, 118 intermediate and 127 advanced adult…

As intelligent textbooks become more ubiquitous in classrooms and educational settings, the need arises to automatically provide formative feedback to written responses provided by students in response to readings. This study develops models to automatically provide feedback to student summaries written at the end of intelligent textbook sections.…