Background music with lyrics can be a prevalent distraction in environments where people study or read while music plays. However, such effects on reading comprehension across different language contexts remain insufficiently investigated. Guided by the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction and the semantic-interference hypothesis, the…

Background: Differentiating typical language development (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD) in a bilingual context is difficult. The societal language is often the only mutual language of the child and the SLT. It has been shown that when assessing second language (L2) performance using tools developed for monolingual children,…

Reading comprehension is a central skill in secondary education. To be able to provide adaptive instruction, teachers need to be able to accurately estimate students' reading comprehension. However, they tend to experience difficulties doing so. Eye tracking can uncover these reading processes by visualizing what a student looked at, in what…

In this commentary, the author explores the tension between almost 30 years of work that has embraced increasingly complex conceptions of digital reading and recent studies that risk oversimplifying digital reading as a singular entity analogous with reading text on a screen. The author begins by tracing a line of theoretical and empirical work…

Background: Morphological awareness plays a crucial role in supporting higher-level text processing. We examined its contribution to reading comprehension in children of different ages and ability levels in order to determine when and for whom morphological awareness is of particular importance. Methods: Three groups of children (aged 6-8 years, N…

The simple views of reading (SVRs) and writing (SVWs) reflect useful frameworks for the psychoeducational evaluation of literacy difficulties. They describe reading comprehension and written expression as the outcome of oral language, decoding, and transcription skills. Prior research has demonstrated that these components explain the vast…

Teaching for theme is one aspect of reading comprehension that is often elusive for both teachers and students. Specifically, teachers are challenged with elevating students' thinking from the plot level to a more abstract level when teaching for theme understanding. Students are challenged with transitioning between the story world and the real…

This study addressed whether an application adapted to working with multiple documents implemented in an iPad Pro tablet would promote students' multiple document comprehension and acceptance of tablets as a multiple document learning tool relative to controls who used a traditional application adapted to sequential reading of single documents.…

Background: Multitasking while reading is a commonplace activity. Many studies have been conducted examining the effect of multitasking on reading comprehension and times. The purpose of this meta-analysis is to consolidate the empirical findings on reading comprehension and times in order to understand the overall effect of multitasking on…

We investigated the association between thinking dispositions and two outcomes of multiple-texts comprehension: integration of conflicting information in argumentative essays; and recall of inferential information as an index of deep comprehension. We focused on two thinking dispositions, need for cognition (NFC) and actively open-minded thinking…

Reading skills are usually assessed in silent conditions, but children often experience noisy educational settings. Effects of auditory distraction on children's reading skills remain relatively unexplored. The present study investigates the influence of two features of background speech--intelligibility and loudness--on children's reading speed…

I present a sampling of picture books with a focus on three peritextual features in particular: dust jackets, case covers that are different from the dust jackets, and endpapers. First, I briefly highlight scholarship related to peritextual features, followed by a description of four picture books with these three peritextual features, and…

This teaching tip aims to build awareness of using a text's structure as a framework for building students' reading comprehension. The authors detail the Framework for Accelerating the Strategic Comprehension of Text (FASCT) to support elementary students reading comprehension abilities by explicitly teaching students to use the structure of a…

This teaching tip aims to build awareness of using a text's structure as a framework for building students' reading comprehension. The authors detail the Framework for Accelerating the Strategic Comprehension of Text (FASCT) to support elementary students reading comprehension abilities by explicitly teaching students to use the structure of a…

A significant positive correlation between higher metacognitive strategy use and better reading comprehension among native English-speaking children and adult learners of English as an additional language, consistently presented in the literature, has not been consistently or directly found among native English-speaking adult high school graduates…