This article represents a literature review and interpretation pertaining to the role that metacognition is seen to play in student performance. It begins by providing evidence from research reported in the literature which indicates that not all students are able to accurately assess their capabilities, and suggests that this lack is linked to…

A reading acceleration program known to improve reading fluency in Hebrew-speaking adults was tested for its effect on children. Eighty-nine Hebrew- and English-speaking children with reading difficulties were divided into a waiting list group and two training groups (Hebrew and English) and underwent 4 weeks of reading acceleration training.…

The purpose of this research was to understand better how morphemic units are encoded and auto-organised in memory and how they are accessed during writing. We hypothesised that the activation of morphemic units would not depend on rule-based learning during primary school but would be determined by frequency-based learning, which is a process…

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…

Additive and interactive effects of word frequency, stimulus quality, and semantic priming have been used to test theoretical claims about the cognitive architecture of word-reading processes. Additive effects among these factors have been taken as evidence for discrete-stage models of word reading. We present evidence from linear mixed-model…

This study investigated context effects of online processing of Chinese academic words during text reading. Undergraduate participants were asked to read Chinese texts that were familiar or unfamiliar (containing physics terminology) to them. Physics texts were selected first, and then we replaced the physics terminology with familiar words; other…

Linguistic dependencies between non-adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non-local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memory when the second dependent is encountered.…

The abundant scientific resources on the Web provide great opportunities for students to expand their science learning, yet easy access to information does not ensure learning. Prior research has found that middle school students tend to read Web-based scientific resources in a shallow, superficial manner. A software tool was designed to support…

Middle College High Schools have contributed to the academic success of at-risk minority students across the country. This educational reform model has been recognized as having a positive impact on minority and poor students. However, an exhaustive search of the literature revealed no documented research to date interpreting the effects of this…

The goal of the current study is to explore the influence of knowledge on socioeconomic discrepancies in word learning and comprehension. After establishing socioeconomic differences in background knowledge (Study 1), the authors presented children with a storybook that incorporates this knowledge (Study 2). Results indicated that middle-income…

To examine the relations between emergent readers' social interaction styles and their comprehension processes, we adapted sociocultural and transactional views of learning and reading, and conducted statistical discourse analysis of 1,359 conversation turns transcribed from 14 preschoolers' 40 buddy reading events. Results show that interaction…

Active reading is fundamental to learning. However, there is little understanding about whether traditional active reading frameworks sufficiently characterize how learners study multimedia tablet textbooks. This paper explores the nature of active reading in the tablet environment through a qualitative study that engaged 30 students in an active…

Because reading for meaning only can lead to low rates of second language (L2) vocabulary learning and because previous research has demonstrated the benefits of word retrieval opportunities for intentional L2 vocabulary learning (Barcroft, 2007; McNamara & Healy, 1995a, Experiment 2; Royer, 1973), the present study assessed the effect of…

This study investigated the impact of topic interest, alongside L2 proficiency and gender, on L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading. A repeated-measures design was used with 135 Korean EFL students. Control variables included topic familiarity, prior target-word knowledge, and target-word difficulty (word length, class, and concreteness).…

The present study aims to investigate the role of extensive reading in the acquisition of implicit phonological knowledge. Through extensive exposure to print, L2 learners can improve their phonological processing skills, and this could contribute to their word recognition fluency. On the basis of the Oxford Placement Test, 30 9th graders and 30…