There is a relationship between children's ability to formulate theories of mind (i.e., metacognitive hypotheses) about persons or characters in a text and their comprehension of the text. Nevertheless, few studies examine how young children engage their ontological background knowledge to formulate their theories-of-mind. Set in a public library…

This study explores the effect of prior discipline-related knowledge in reading comprehension for two groups of students of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL). The first group (G1), had 22 students enrolled in a general Spanish course and the second (G2), had 18 students enrolled in a course of Spanish for medical professions. The aim was to…

This classroom-based case study examines how Spanish-English emergent bilingual children in a second grade one-way immersion classroom draw on prior knowledge and experiences and use comprehension strategies to discuss and comprehend three texts with different levels of cultural relevance. Through an examination of the rich range of cognitive,…

Tasks provide engaging ways to involve learners in meaningful, real-world activities with the foreign language (FL). Yet selecting classroom tasks suitable to learners' linguistic readiness is challenging, and task-based research is exploring the relationship between learners' overall abilities (e.g., reading, grammatical) and the complexity and…

With 97 learners in an advanced Spanish course, the study examines the effects of textual enhancement adjuncts, prior subject knowledge, first language (L1) reading ability, and second language (L2) Spanish proficiency on L2 comprehension of scientific passages. Readings included two texts with two types of embedded questions: a pause or written…

The purpose of this study was to examine how fourth-grade Spanish-English speaking bilingual students in the USA participated differently in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) literature groups when they were invited to use all of their linguistic resources vs. when they were restricted to communicate in English only. The theoretical underpinning…

A study investigated the effect of relevant background knowledge on the reading comprehension of students of Spanish. Students with limited knowledge of baseball took a comprehension test on a Spanish-language report of a baseball game. Results indicate that background knowledge is possibly more important than language level for comprehension.…

Investigated the effects of readers' gender, topic familiarity, enjoyment, and interest on second language reading. University students of Spanish completed a reading passage each day, a written recall comprehension task, and a questionnaire. Findings suggest that in addition to linguistic factors, other variables such as gender, passage content,…

A guide for teachers of second language reading offers ideas for using authentic texts as instructional materials. The guide focuses on how to teach students to become strategic readers and use their background knowledge to enhance comprehension. Schema theory is proposed as a framework for approaching reading tasks, by providing relevant pre- and…