We conducted two experiments to assess the alignment between Generative AI (GenAI) text personalization and hypothetical readers' profiles. In Experiment 1, four LLMs (i.e., Claude 3.5 Sonnet; Llama; Gemini Pro 1.5; ChatGPT 4) were prompted to tailor 10 science texts (i.e., biology, chemistry, physics) to accommodate four different profiles…

The psychological aspects of the properties and relationships that emerge during text comprehension have primarily been studied from both subjective and objective viewpoints. This paper aims to explore the psychological factors influencing scientific text comprehension, focusing on the quantitative and qualitative patterns of how students perceive…

Text complexity has received increased attention due to the CCSS, which call for students to comprehend increasingly more complex texts as they progress through grades. Quantitative text complexity (or readability) indices are based on text attributes (e.g., sentence lengths, and lexical, syntactic, & semantic difficulty), quantified by…

The paper provides an example of how immigration is constructed by receiving societies as a comprehension or language problem that requires special solutions. It focuses on the application of Easy-to-Read, a simplified register currently in expansion which addresses different groups of people with intellectual disabilities, to immigrants in Spain.…

Uganda Baptist Seminary (UBS) is accredited by the Ugandan National Council for Higher Education and teaches church leaders from Uganda and its surrounding seven countries. The required language of educational instruction is English, although the students come from a multitude of different native languages. This research stems from a need to…

In this paper, we applied the crowdsourcing approach to develop an automated popularity summary scoring, called wild summaries. In contrast, the golden standard summaries generated by one or more experts are called expert summaries. The innovation of our study is to compute LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) similarities between target summary and…

Textbooks are heavily used in secondary-level content area classes, but previous research has identified numerous challenges for students associated with reading and understanding these texts. While students can learn reading strategies that help them better understand text, it is unclear the extent to which textbooks are written to promote or…

Standards of coherence are one of the major factors that influence reading comprehension. This study investigated the standards of coherence that second language (L2) learners employ when reading. In a pair of experiments, Japanese learners of English read two-sentence texts with varying causal and semantic relatedness between sentences and then…

This study is a quantitative, quasi-experimental investigation focusing on the effects of word recognition training on word recognition fluency, reading speed, and reading comprehension for 151 Japanese university students at a lower-intermediate reading proficiency level. Four treatment groups were given training in orthographic, phonological,…

This paper represents some suggestions towards discourse-analytic approaches for ESL/EFL education, with the focus on identifying the textual forms which can contribute to the textual difficulty. Textual difficulty/comprehensibility, rather than being purely text-based or reader-dependent, is certainly a matter of interaction between text and…

Thirty-two fourth grade students were divided into two equal-sized groups according to reading ability. Each student read and recalled four passages from fourth-grade texts. The passages were either an original version, a semantic simplification, a syntactic simplification, or a combined rewrite. One week later, each child read and recalled…

Scientific discourse is difficult to read because of its lexical, syntactic, semantic, and logical features. This paper discusses each of those features, giving special attention to syntax, and suggests ways in which discourse analysis can be used to teach content reading in sciences and to rewrite scientific text for instructional purposes. Some…

Investigated within-sentence contextual constraints in a sentence-completion task completed by 408 students from grade 6. (AA)

Features are discussed that are critical to the comprehension of texts and that readability formulas cannot handle. The critique and alternative analyses are confined to public and institutional documents and are based on research in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. Two types of comprehensibility complications are examined, those…