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…

This study aims to determine the effectiveness of Fry readability-based digital storybooks on reading comprehension skills among elementary school students. The method used in this study was an experimental research design with a pretest-posttest control group design to measure students' reading comprehension skills. The sample of this study was…

Readers often struggle to identify the main ideas in expository texts. Existing research and instruction provide some guidance on how to encourage readers to identify main ideas. However, there is substantial variability in how main ideas are operationalized and how readers are prompted to identify main ideas. This variability hinders…

Personalized learning technologies such as automated reading tutors have been proposed as a way to help struggling readers acquire needed skills while simultaneously encouraging engaged, sustained reading of entire books. This article investigates a key step in the development of such technologies: translating an entire novel into a sequence of…

Readers often struggle to identify the main ideas in expository texts. Existing research and instruction provide some guidance on how to encourage readers to identify main ideas. However, there is substantial variability in how main ideas are operationalized and how readers are prompted to identify main ideas. This variability hinders…

A teacher's ability to read effectively is critical to that individual's ability to teach reading skills. Correspondingly, most state departments of education require that prospective teachers earn a passing score on a standardized reading comprehension test before they can enter university-based teacher education programs or otherwise get a…

Reading comprehension instruction may be critical for students to learn from social studies text, particularly for students who are not yet proficient in reading. Understanding factors that correspond to high levels of student engagement during text-based social studies instruction appears particularly important. Data were collected from 50…

Reading scores have not made a significant shift since the 1990's when national and state standardized assessments initially tested grade level reading comprehension (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], n.d. & Florida Department of Education [FLDOE], n.d.). In addition, when analyzing subgroups, economically disadvantaged students…

Selecting the appropriate texts as the authentic material for English teaching, particularly at the university level, matched with students' mastery level is still challenging. This study attempts to investigate the readability level of reading texts through the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) issued by ChatGPT, focused on…

Many digital reading applications have built-in features to control the presentation flow of texts by segmenting those texts into smaller linguistic units. Whether and how these segmentation techniques affect the readability of texts is largely unknown. With this background, the current study examined a recent proposal that a sentence-by-sentence…

Vocabulary knowledge is one of the most important elements of reading comprehension. Text coverage is the proportion of known words in a given text. We hypothesize that text comprehension increases exponentially with text coverage due to network effects and activation of prior knowledge. In addition, the lexical threshold hypothesis states that…

Extensive reading is an approach to language learning that encourages learners to read a large quantity of easy reading material. A substantial body of research confirms the effectiveness of this approach for developing proficiency in both first (L1) and second (L2) languages. This paper explains what extensive reading is, why it is important, and…

A recent survey aimed at identifying the most popular current programs used to teach reading found that one common feature of all the top sellers was that they organize their teaching around leveled books. Other recent surveys show that teaching reading with leveled books is on the increase and that teachers believe it is endorsed or supported by…

Appendix A of the Common Core State Standards (hereafter CCSS) contains a review of the research stressing the importance of being able to read complex text for success in college and career. The research shows that while the complexity of reading demands for college, career, and citizenship have held steady or risen over the past half century,…

This study demonstrates the generalization of previous laboratory results showing the benefits of self-explanation reading training (SERT) to college students' course exam performance. The participants were 265 students enrolled in an Introductory Biology course, 59 of whom were provided with SERT training. The results showed that SERT benefited…