Three groups of reading-disabled children were found in studies of English, German, and French: a group with a double deficit in reading and spelling, a group with a single spelling deficit, and a more rarely reported group presenting a single reading deficit. This study set out to examine whether these groups can be found in adults, readers and…

This study investigates preverbal structural and semantic processing in Japanese, a head-final language, using the maze task. Two sentence types were tested--simple scrambled sentences (Experiment 1) and control sentences (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that even for simple, mono-clausal Japanese sentences, (1) there are online processing…

In this article, I focus on three areas of reading assessment that I believe to be crucial for students' reading development: developing comprehensive formative assessments, assessing the wide array of factors that contribute to students' reading development, and fostering student independence by helping students learn to use reading assessment on…

Background: Specific language impairment (SLI) is heterogeneous and identifying subgroups within it may help explain the aetiology of the condition. Phonological processing abilities distinguish between children with SLI who do and do not have reading decoding impairments (RDIs). Aims: To probe different levels of phonological processing in…

Since 1969, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been providing policymakers, educators, and the public with reports on academic performance and progress of the nation's students. The assessment is given periodically in a variety of subjects: mathematics, reading, writing, science, the arts, civics, economics, geography, U.S.…

This report summarizes Austin Independent School District (AISD) English language learner (ELL) students' performance on the Evaluación del Desarrollo de la Lectura, an assessment of Spanish reading ability, over three consecutive school years. It includes only ELLs who joined AISD in kindergarten in 2012.

Research in literature reports the importance of L2 vocabulary and syntactic knowledge on the learners' reading comprehension. In this regard, the current study investigated the role of vocabulary knowledge that is disunited into depth and breadth dimensions and syntactic knowledge in the reading comprehension scores of an advanced cohort of…

Background: Students with intellectual disabilities (IDs) have various learning difficulties and are at risk for school failure. Large inter-individual differences are described for reading, but it is unclear how these vary as a function of grade. The aim of this study was to examine various reading fluency, accuracy and comprehension parameters…

Reading comprehension assessments often include multiple-choice (MC) questions, but some researchers doubt their validity in measuring comprehension. Consequently, new assessments may include more short-answer (SA) questions. The current study contributes to the research comparing MC and SA questions by evaluating the effects of anticipated…

The present study examined potential synergistic relationships between reading engagement and reading comprehension among 3,689 third and fourth graders across 59 schools in North Carolina. Using hierarchical regression analyses, we replicated previous findings that reading engagement explains unique variance in reading comprehension. Our results…

Reading literacy is one of the most important abilities acquired by students at school. The aim of this study was to compare the development of reading ability of deaf and hearing students in Iran. A retrospective study was done through "Progress in International Reading Literacy Study scale with a cross sectional design. Participants were 80…

Demotivation is a relatively new and trending topic in the field of L2 learning. Previous studies have attempted to classify several factors related to demotivation and identify how those factors affect teachers and L2 learners. In the current study, a short questionnaire with items that can be classified into five demotivation factors based on…

Canadian post-secondary classrooms are linguistically diverse. This diversity comes from immigration, more access to higher education for marginalized and minority groups, and international student recruitment. An institute's language prerequisites serve as tools to help admissions decide who is linguistically prepared for study in English.…

Background: Connectives, such as "because" or "although," explicitly indicate how to semantically link individual segments of a text. Knowledge of connectives has been shown to significantly contribute to variance explanation in comprehension of English and Dutch texts, particularly amongst monolingual students and students…

The central purpose of this paper is to examine validity problems arising from the multiple-choice items and technical passages in the Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based Test (TOEFL iBT) reading section, primarily concentrating on construct-irrelevant variance (Messick, 1989). My personal TOEFL iBT experience, along with my…