This study aimed to investigate the types of cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies employed by secondary school students in Malaysia to improve their comprehension. The study employed a mixed-method approach which involves the instruments of a questionnaire and an interview. This study was conducted at SMK Kapit, involving ninety Form 4…

This study is motivated by the gap existing between theory and practice in teaching listening. Most of the techniques used to teach listening put more emphasis on top-down processing while listeners' problems are more of perceptive ones (bottom-up). In order to address the pervasive decoding problem in listening, this study suggests using…

Comprehension is a critical part of the reading process, and yet learners continue to struggle with it and teachers continue to neglect it in their teaching. Many reasons exist for the lack of focus on reading comprehension instruction, but for the most part, teachers simply do not seem to view comprehension as part of the reading process, are not…

Research shows that test method can exert a significant impact on test takers' performance and thereby contaminate test scores. We argue that common test method can exert the same effect as common stimuli and violate the conditional independence assumption of item response theory models because, in general, subsets of items which have a shared…

Current Arabic reading instruction places strong emphasis on orthographic skills and little emphasis on phonological and morphological skills. Yet, the role of each skill in reading development in Arabic is not well understood. The purpose of this literature review was to examine the degree to which children learning to read in Arabic use…

Primary-grade students' experiences with text should prepare them to critically read an extensive range of text types throughout their schooling and career, a primary goal of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). However, research demonstrates that narrative text overshadows other text types in the primary grades. The purpose of this…

Children with good and poor listening comprehension (n = 17 in each group) 9-10 years of age were trained to self-generate mental images for sentences and stories. Their ability to identify the antecedents of personal pronouns in individual sentences and also to select the appropriate pronoun in a story cloze task was assessed pre- and…

While teacher aides often provide individual and group reading instruction for at-risk readers, research suggests these interventions may not always bring about reading gains. This Australian study investigated upper primary school teacher aides' definitions of reading, drawing on semi-structured interview responses and written definitions…

This research examines the characteristics of reader understandings that vary from those stated in the text. Eighty-seven fourth graders orally read complex academic literary and scientific texts, followed by probed retellings. Retold ideas not directly supported by, or reflective of, the texts were identified. These differing understandings…

There are many instructional approaches for helping English language learners improve both reading comprehension and overall language proficiency. One such approach, the literature circle--which is somewhat like a student book club in the classroom--has drawn a great deal of attention in recent years (Schlick Noe and Johnson 1999). Many teachers…

We investigated the online and offline effects of learner and instructional characteristics on conceptual change of a robust misconception in science. Fifty-nine undergraduate university students with misconceptions about evolution were identified as espousing evaluativist or non-evaluativist epistemic beliefs in science. Participants were…

The present study focused on the analysis of listening sections of two international English proficiency tests, i.e. IELTS and TOEFL tests, and one local English proficiency test, i.e. TOLIMO from pragmatic perspective. An attempt was made to explore the areas of pragmatic knowledge presented, and to assess test takers' pragmatic knowledge. For…

Note taking (NT) in lectures is as active a skill as listening, which stimulates it, and as challenging as writing, which is the end product. Literature on lecture NT misses an integration of the processes involved in listening with those in NT. In this article, a taxonomy is proposed of lecture NT skills and subskills based on a similar list…

Using a case study design, our research explored question generation as a reading comprehension strategy, focusing on the types of questions 4th- and 5th-grade students posed before, during, and after reading narrative text. The authors aimed to determine whether their participants are ready to pose the higher-level questions expected of them by…

Art-based reading instruction and interventions for elementary and middle school students are growing in popularity despite scant theoretical rationale and empirical research support. This study explored the degree to which painting comprehension processes map onto text comprehension processes in this population. In particular, we used think aloud…