The performance measures from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study revealed no measurable growth in the U.S. average reading scores of 4th graders for the period between 2011 and 2016. Therefore, the diverse learning needs of students need to be customized if the education system is to accomplish its goal to graduate well-informed…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how students who were enrolled in a developmental writing course at a community college used and adapted cognitive writing strategies learned in the course. The students participated in a funded research project for the development and evaluation of a writing curriculum based on self-regulated strategy…

In this technical report, we present results of classification accuracy analyses to identify cut scores to optimize sensitivity and specificity for the easyCBM literacy assessments in Kindergarten through Grade 2. In conducting these analyses, we used the following approach: We kept sensitivity above 0.80 and maximized specificity from there. If…

Reading is a critical skill as it provides a gateway for other learning within and outside of school. Many children struggle to acquire this fundamental skill. Suboptimal design of books for beginning readers may be one factor that contributes to the difficulties children experience. Specifically, extraneous details in illustrations (i.e.,…

Reading is a fundamental skill for academic success because university students need to comprehend an extensive amount of information in a short time to achieve their academic goals. However, the influx of new technologies into education has challenged the teaching of reading skills in a foreign language. The purpose of this study was to explore…

While Audience Response System (ARS) such as Kahoot! can promote learner self-regulation and enhance comprehension by engaging cognitive processing on multiple levels, learning behavior in questioning with ARS was understudied. The present study explores the use of Kahoot! with student-generated questioning, to report the effect on students'…

Background: Apart from being a knowledge-gaining commodity, critical literacy is believed to be a practice that exists between people, groups and communities in a sociopolitical and cultural context. It is assumed that without strong literacy skills, post-secondary education and employment options are limited. It is thus against this background…

Recent developments in English language teaching and learning have heightened the need for the use of tasks to foster second language (L2) learning. Central to task-based interaction is the repetition of the same task. Task repetition (TR) stimulates cognitive skills for speech learning and functionality. It has been emphasised in research and…

Access to quality literacy instruction is access to acceptance into the literate community in which students with severe disabilities live and work. Providing that instruction to students with severe disabilities who are not traditional readers and writers can be challenging. Luckily, there are many easy and interactive tools available for…

In this study, an intervention program was designed based on the instructional principles of self-regulated learning (SRL), and its effectiveness in enhancing Hong Kong secondary three students' classical Chinese (CC) reading comprehension and motivation was evaluated. A pretest-posttest treatment-control group quasi-experimental design was used.…

This paper introduces a new observation system that is designed to investigate students' and teachers' talk during literacy instruction, "Creating Opportunities to Learn from Text" (COLT). Using video-recorded observations of 2nd-3rd grade literacy instruction (N = 51 classrooms, 337 students, 151 observations), we found that nine types…

It would not be presumptuous to say that the younger generation is not reading at a sustained level. Many people view sustained reading as overly time-consuming and unable to meet the instant gratification that social media so readily provides. Educators are embracing the reality that, as a consequence, students' learning styles have also changed.…

This longitudinal study examined story-writing development of students from Grade 4 to Grade 6, comparing the developmental trajectories of English as a first language (EL1s; n = 43) and English learners (ELs; n = 108) in general, and in groups of EL1s and ELs with typically developing and poor reader profiles. In relation to their EL1 or EL…

The paper provides an example of how immigration is constructed by receiving societies as a comprehension or language problem that requires special solutions. It focuses on the application of Easy-to-Read, a simplified register currently in expansion which addresses different groups of people with intellectual disabilities, to immigrants in Spain.…

This study examines the relationships among various major factors that may affect the difficulty level of language tests in an attempt to enhance the robustness of item difficulty estimation, which constitutes a crucial factor ensuring the equivalency of high-stakes tests. The observed difficulties of the reading and listening sections of two EFL…