This article explores definitions of reading comprehension, research on how reading comprehension is assessed, and issues in assessing the reading comprehension of English language learners (ELLs). By way of illustration, I present aspects of the literacy practices of an intermediate-grade ELL in a suburban school of the Lower Mainland of British…

Cognitive neuropsychological studies of bilingual patients with aphasia have contributed to our understanding of how the brain processes different languages. The question we asked is whether differences in script have any impact on language processing in bilingual aphasic patients who speak languages with different writing systems: Chinese and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the redundancy effects obtained when spoken information was duplicated in writing during the learning of a multimedia document. Documents consisting of diagrams and spoken information on the development of memory models were presented to three groups of students. In the first group, no written text was…

Acquisition of orthographic knowledge and phonemic sensitivity are processes that are central to early reading development in several languages. The language-specific characteristics of the alphasyllabaries ( Bright, 1996), however, challenge the constructs of orthographic knowledge and phonemic sensitivity as discussed in the context of…

Sound symbolism is the notion that the relation between word sounds and word meaning is not arbitrary for all words, but rather there is a subset of words in the world's languages for which sounds and their symbols have some degree of correspondence. This research investigates sound symbolism as a possible means of gaining semantic knowledge of…

Researchers, the Deaf community, teachers of deaf children and speech and language therapists all share a concern about how to improve deaf children's written language skills. One part of literacy is story writing or narrative. A finding from a small number of studies is that children exposed to sign language from early childhood onwards achieve…

Corpus-based research has shown that the frequency of use of particular grammatical structures and lexis in English is not always congruent with the content or ordering of explicit rules in pedagogical materials. The present study provides an additional example from French, focusing on word-order rules related to adjective position and the…

The effects of a multicomponent intervention involving self-regulated strategy development delivered via video self-modeling on the written language performance of 3 students with Asperger syndrome were examined. During intervention sessions, each student watched a video of himself performing strategies for increasing the number of words written…

To support and continue the motivation of participants in virtual learning environments it is important to achieve a successful learning atmosphere. Therefore, it is necessary to reach the participants on a personal level and to perceive their personal needs and emotions when conversing with them. These factors of learning motivation depend on the…

The aim of this study is to discuss the interaction of linguistic complexity and morpho-syntactic development in foreign language learners. The analysis of morpho-syntactic structures was carried out within the framework of Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998). To capture the level of complexity we investigate the following: sentence length,…

The origins of written language and the study of the alphabet's evolution from pictographic icon or glyph to phonetic, syllabic code are fundamental to the study of writing. Electronically-generated typographies have reawakened interest in letterforms, alphabets, typefaces, and the physical arrangement of words on the page. Fonts, a word that…

Error Monitoring, a learning strategy designed to enable a student to detect and correct errors in written products, was taught to nine learning disabled (LD) adolescents. The instructional procedure involved an 11 step process including such procedures as describing the steps of the strategy, modeling the strategy, and student practice to…

THIS "EXERCISE BOOK" CONTAINS VOCABULARY DRILLS AND QUESTIONS BASED ON THE TWENTY LECTURES OF THE READER VOLUME. FOR EACH LECTURE UNIT THERE ARE TWO VOCABULARY DRILLS AND A LIST OF 20 QUESTIONS TO BE ANSWERED. THE FIRST VOCABULARY DRILL IS COORDINATED WITH THE VOCABULARY LISTS OF THE LECTURE BOOK, AND CONSISTS OF THE NEW VOCABULARY ITEMS USED IN…

THE PASHTO WRITING SYSTEM IS BRIEFLY DESCRIBED HERE FOR SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH. THE PRINCIPAL LETTERS AND THEIR MODIFIED FORMS ARE PRESENTED AND THE PRINCIPLES OF JUNCTURE AND WORD DIVISION ARE TREATED. THE USE OF EACH SYMBOL IS ILLUSTRATED BY EXAMPLES IN PASHTO SCRIPT WITH PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTIONS AND ENGLISH GLOSSES. THE AUTHOR IDENTIFIES THOSE…

Experiments within the microgenetic paradigm provide an assessment of the role of stimulus structure and, inferentially, of cognitive structure on perception. Two experiments investigating the effect of redundancy (structure) in written language on visual perception are reported. Seven-letter arrays differing in percentage of redundancy were…