The purpose of the present study was to explain the moderating role of rapid automatized naming (RAN) in word reading with a cusp catastrophe model. We hypothesized that increases in RAN performance speed beyond a critical point would be associated with the disruption in word reading, consistent with a "generic shutdown" hypothesis.…

This study examined the effects of two types of pre-listening activities: bottom-up and top-down on Iranian elementary EFL learners' listening comprehension performance. By TOFEL (PBT) test, 90 learners were selected as elementary ones for this study. They were randomly assigned to two experimental and one control groups each consisting of 30…

Students with learning disabilities (LD) in reading often struggle to succeed due to difficulties with reading comprehension. Comprehension difficulties can impact access to a variety of text types, including informational texts. Researchers suggest that students with LD in reading require explicit comprehension supports before, during, and after…

In this study, gain score, and categorical growth models were used to examine the role of student (gender and socioeconomic level) and school characteristics (school size and school resources) in the student growth on comprehension skills in language. The participants of this study were 2,416 sixth-grade students in 2011 who became seventh-grade…

This study addressed the issue of Grade 12 students reading below proficiency and their lived experiences within a personalized learning instructional approach. To address this problem, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore Grade 12 students who read at basic or below basic levels on the Scholastic Reading Inventory (2013)…

The goal of this study is to identify major research trends and focus in the field of educational research. To this end, 22,000 titles consisting of PhD dissertations, journal papers and conference proceedings were retrieved from the ERIC (Education Resources Information Center - https://eric.ed.gov/?) database in the period from 2009 to 2018. A…

Collaborative learning designs, such as problem-based learning (PBL), have the potential to help students build valuable team-based professional skills needed for life after schooling within higher-educational settings (Desimone, 2009; Savery, 2006); however, motivating students to work together to successfully achieve outcomes often proves…

Students with Learning Disabilities (LDs) have less extensive vocabularies than their typically developing peers (Simmons & Kameenui, 1990). This is a critical problem, as the importance of vocabulary knowledge in relation to reading comprehension is widely documented in the literature (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983; Stahl, 1983) and has been…

U.S. higher education attracts many international graduate students--particularly those from China today where many of them become international teaching assistants (ITAs) in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, which not only benefits the students, but also our country as a whole. However, unfortunately, the issue of the…

Notions of accessibility bring to question the perceived deficits in narrative comprehension for autistic people. This deficit has been positioned as having a cognitive processing disposition towards local coherence, rather than global coherence. Rather than a unitary deficit in the individual, reduced performance on inferential narrative…

Standardized assessments are focused on integrating knowledge from multiple sources and developing composed written responses. This requires the students to be able to read and comprehend on grade level, within the various subject areas (reading, math, science, and social studies), which are skills students with disabilities struggle to do. The…

Incited by the National Assessment of Educational Progress' 2009 Reading Framework and the Common Core State Standards, recent shifts in national education goals have urged English language arts teachers to make curriculum adjustments. One such adjustment is to shift their focus from fiction, which has traditionally dominated the curriculum, to…

Leading scholars (Gilbert, 2009; Walter, 2008) have highlighted the importance of phonological processing in learning to read. Nevertheless, reading in Japan has traditionally been taught without adequate attention to the role of phonological processing. Accordingly, it was speculated that Japanese university students would demonstrate superior…

This study explored the background knowledge (BK) and reading comprehension (RC) relationship for struggling adult readers. Using confirmatory factor analyses, a single-factor BK model exhibited better fit than a two-factor model separating academic knowledge and general information, which indicates that BK represents a unidimensional construct…

This paper presents an empirical study that investigates the role of vocabulary knowledge in listening comprehension with 33 advanced Turkish learners of English as a foreign language. The Vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt, Schmitt & Clapham, 2001) is used to measure the vocabulary knowledge of the participants and a standardized listening test…