Knowledge development, application, and refinement are essential parts of students' reading. One way to observe how students use their knowledge as they read is through talk. Studies routinely indicate that though reading is a social endeavor, teachers spend most of the allotted instructional time talking or using discourse patterns that do not…

A reader's ability to go beyond their surface-level understanding of words and to build a deeper representation of the text in their mind (i.e., reading comprehension) is predicated on a range of reader- and text-level variables that indicate how well a certain reader can read a certain text. The following study evaluates the extent to which the…

This quantitative study endeavored to compare a new strategy of making irrelevant information less salient with a common reading strategy of highlighting to determine which would best aid students in making connections within and between multiple texts. Participants were 60 high school students, ranging in age from 14-17 years old. The adolescents…

Emojis are nonverbal elements used in text-based communication that may function like gestures in spoken communication (Feldman et al., 2017; McCulloch & Gawne, 2018). Like words, emojis can convey semantic information and support message comprehension (Lo, 2008; Riordan, 2017b). Nevertheless, the cognitive and perceptual processes involved in…

A growing body of academic writing literature has been devoted to studying the rhetorical patterns and language use in diverse academic texts. One of the central goals of these studies is to demystify these texts to acquaint writers, particularly less experienced ones, with the genre conventions. However, Teaching Philosophy Statements (TPS) as a…

Children with a specific learning disability often struggle with written communication compared to their typically-developing peers (Graham & Harris, 2002; Graham et al., 2017; Troia, 2006). The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of a researcher-created instructional strategy (i.e., "Audience and Structure…

Written assignments are, perhaps, one of the most common types of coursework that students will encounter in their undergraduate studies. This study describes the communicative purpose and textual and linguistic characteristics of university assignments written for content classes, taking into account variation across communicative text types and…

Reading comprehension can be analyzed from three points of view: Semantics, Assessment, and Cognition. Here, Semantics refers to the task of identifying discourse relations in text. Assessment involves utilizing these relations to obtain meaningful question-answer pairs. Cognition means categorizing questions according to their difficulty or…

High school graduates should be able to read to complete everyday tasks. Without this ability, their quality of life could decline from the lack, a negative mindset, or both. Therefore, educational stakeholders aiding students with reading struggles must find the most effective solutions for these students. Students achieving below-average on…

One important concept in the development of number knowledge is the cardinality principle, or knowing that the last word counted refers to the total number of items within the set. One prominent theory suggests that children learn this concept by observing sets being both counted and labeled with the correct set size (e.g., 1-2-3! 3!), thus…

Today, educators try to maximize eLearning effectiveness by using various methodologies to engage the learner and increase learning and recall. If educators want to be able to continue this process, new eLearning methodologies must be investigated. The aim of this study was to determine if the method in which lesson content is present can affect…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether teaching students about the structure of a text would be associated with improved reading comprehension. Science texts were used with the intention of adding to what is known about content-area reading comprehension. To investigate the effects of teaching science text structure, a reading…

Text classification typically performs best with large training sets, but short texts are very common on the World Wide Web. Can we use resampling and data augmentation to construct larger texts using similar terms? Several current methods exist for working with short text that rely on using external data and contexts, or workarounds. Our focus is…

We address the challenging task of "computational natural language inference," by which we mean bridging two or more natural language texts while also providing an explanation of how they are connected. In the context of question answering (i.e., finding short answers to natural language questions), this inference connects the question…