Improving reading skills is considered one of education's highest priorities. The present study investigated teachers' knowledge of reading skills instruction in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). A mixed-methods design was used to obtain data that would improve understanding of teachers' knowledge about teaching reading skills to d/Deaf and hard…

Students majoring in translation at the College of Languages and Translation take a stylistics course (3 hours per week) in the 5th semester of the translation program. The course aims to introduce students to the stylistic features of different genres in English such as journalese, advertisements, commercial, scientific, and legal texts. The…

No two students in grades 4-8 are identical, and many struggle with literacy for different reasons. Using a teacher-friendly, hands-on approach, this eminently practical book walks educators through the nuts and bolts of literacy intervention in the middle grades. Highlights include "North Star" principles to orient instruction, an…

In educational and psychological assessments, attending to item response process can be useful in understanding and improving the validity of measurement. This dissertation consists of three studies each of which proposes and applies item response theory (IRT) methods for modeling and understanding cognitive/psychological response process in…

Standardized reading assessments are often used as an admissions criterion for college admittance, however, the relationship and predictive validity of reading assessments to academic achievement remains in question. Through a quantitative review of the literature, we conducted a meta-analysis to examine how well performance on college reading…

Test-based accountability pressures have had mixed effects on the student outcomes that they are intended to improve. Accountability policies have also resulted in transfers of less effective teachers into untested early grades and more effective teachers in early grades into tested grades, which could yield unintended negative consequences. In…

The problem this study addressed is the lack of access to high-quality public-school early childhood education for children in small, rural communities in Missouri. The purpose of this quantitative study was to analyze the effects of public-school early childhood education on the reading levels of elementary students in two small midwestern…

Reading comprehension assessments are used for postsecondary course placement and advising, and they are components of college entrance exams. Therefore, a quantitative understanding of the relationship between reading comprehension assessments and postsecondary academic achievement is needed. To address this need, we conducted a meta-analysis to…

Morphological processing is the use of morphological structure during word reading. This study examined the role of morphological processing in automaticity in word reading processes and asked whether automatic morphological processing made a unique contribution to decoding, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension outcomes of middle school…

Successful reading comprehension is not a guarantee, even for highly skilled readers. When comprehension fails, the ability of the reader to recognize the failure may be critical to avoiding "mis"comprehension (i.e., false confidence in an inaccurate text representation) and to taking steps to improve comprehension. Generally, people…

We investigated 2 hypotheses of a recently proposed integrative theoretical model of reading, the direct and indirect effects model of reading (DIER; Kim, 2017b, 2019): (a) hierarchical relations and (b) dynamic relations (or differential relations) of skills to reading comprehension. Students were assessed on reading comprehension, word reading,…

Purpose: This study investigates the effects of an integrated oral language and listening comprehension intervention for early elementary students with ASD. Methods: Students (n = 43) were randomly assigned to intervention or control comparison conditions, with intervention students receiving instruction in small groups of 3 or 4. Groups were led…

This study examined the relationship between parental self-efficacy in parents of young deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children and children's spoken language skills. A retrospective within-subjects study design was used that included 24 mother-child dyads with DHH children. Parental self-efficacy was assessed using the Scale of Parental…

This study examined the effects of watching gestures and lip movement on second language (English) listening comprehension. The participants were 30 high and 22 low proficient learners of English. There were six listening tasks combining two variables: modality and difficulty. The modality consisted of three types of assessments: Body (the upper…

This study examined the impact of a blended teaching approach versus traditional instruction on listening comprehension and strategy use among EFL students in a Taiwanese university. Using a quasi-experimental design, 103 low-intermediate students were divided into experimental (n=52) and control (n=51) groups over 18 weeks. The experimental group…