In the "Sound Pattern of English," Chomsky and Halle (1968) posited that English orthography, despite the complexity in how it relates to phonology, is in fact more "optimal" in at least one aspect: how it relates to morphology. A root or stem tends to maintain a constant visual form across words built upon it even as its…

This study investigated the effect of LWR and the level of passage difficulty on L2 reading comprehension. Five upper intermediate ESL students were exposed to four different treatment combinations of silent reading and LWR with low and high intrinsic load reading passages. Reading comprehension was measured by immediate recall protocol. Under the…

There is a strong international demand for official certification of French competence. A range of tests are available to meet this goal. Among the recognized tests available for this purpose is the "DELF" ("Diplôme d'études en langue française"). The "DELF" has been awarded the Association of Language Testers in…

Comprehension is the overall goal of reading. One approach to help students increase their comprehension is to discuss a text in small-group settings. Yet, many students struggle to fully engage in meaningful discussions within these groups. Students' ability to retain and share what they read is one reason for this lack of discussion. Teaching…

This paper highlights how the application of principles of formative assessment and a generous reading protocol changed my perspective on disappointing student work and led to course adjustments to positively impact student learning.

In this review, I advance the embodied cognition movement in cognitive psychology as both a challenge and an invitation for the study of reading comprehension. Embodied cognition challenges theories which assume that mental operations are based in a common, abstract, amodal code of propositions and schemata. Based on growing research in behavioral…

Research shows that misconceptions are usually detrimental to text comprehension. However, whether misconceptions also impair metacomprehension accuracy, that is, the accuracy with which one self-assesses one's text comprehension, has received far less attention. We conducted a study in which we examined students' (N = 47) comprehension and…

One line of research on student understanding of complex systems has tended to emphasize discontinuities between common misconceptions and relatively more sophisticated understandings. Other work has focused on instruction while acknowledging the existence of other ways of understanding complex systems, but less emphasis has been on examining the…

As the standards in different content areas become more in depth, many students especially ESOL students, tend to have difficulty understanding the vocabulary and are unable to read and understand the content, especially in science and social studies. If students are given a literacy push in all areas of school, not just in reading and language…

Online learning education is fast-growing as its tentacles cover virtually all countries of the world today. This medium does not come as a stunner since online learning education shields against the barriers of time and distance and other militating factors of online learning. But that is not to say that online learning education has no cons to…

Summarization. Just when we thought we knew everything about it, the doors to divergent thinking open and summarization--no longer something that students must endure until you get to the "cool" stuff--takes on an exciting new role in student success! In this second edition of "Summarization in Any Subject," Dedra Stafford…

This article reports on the utilization of group discussion by teachers to improve the comprehension skills of learners in their multilingual classes. The study aimed to examine solutions to low comprehension skills among learners whose language of instruction differed from their home languages. The participants were teachers (n = 12) and learners…

Radical awareness (i.e. the ability to identify, analyze, and manipulate radicals within compound characters) plays an important role in character reading and learning for first language and second language (L2) learners of Chinese. Previous studies have shown that radical awareness contributes to character recognition, inference, and…

Mathematical problems can be divided into two types, namely, process-open and process-constrained problems. Solving these two types of problems may require different cognitive mechanisms. However, there has been only one study that investigated the differences of the cognitive abilities in process-open and process-constrained problem solving, and…

Providing challenging curriculum in a literacy classroom of students whose reading abilities range widely can be a challenge. Integrating interdisciplinary book selections into a self-selected reading program, however, provides students with challenge by engaging them with big ideas. This article describes methods of integrating advanced…