Poor Reading Skills Research Articles

Effect of reading intervention and task difficulty on orthographic and phonological reading systems in the brain

Children with poor reading skills have differences in brain function when compared to typically-developing readers, and there may also be changes in the brain following reading intervention. However, most functional imaging studies focus on phonological reading tasks with one level of task difficulty. The purpose of this study was to compare good and poor readers on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks of orthography (spelling) and phonology (rhyming) before and after 3 months of school-based intervention. These tasks were also modulated by task difficulty based on printed word frequency. The results showed that primarily left hemisphere regions were activated for the spelling and rhyming tasks, and poor readers showed a pattern of increased activation in bilateral inferior frontal, bilateral insula, right parietal, and left cerebellum following intervention. Activity in left pars triangularis and right parietal regions were associated with gains in decoding skills. Intervention effects appeared across blocks of easy and difficult words, except for the right parietal cortex. In this region, poor readers had greater activity on the easy word blocks after intervention, which indicates that there was increased recruitment of the right parietal cortex for relatively easy words. These results indicate that effects of intervention may be more evident on phonological tasks in comparison to orthographic tasks, and some of these effects may be modulated by relative task difficulty.

Adults with Poor Reading Skills, Older Adults, and College Students: the Meanings They Understand During Reading Using a Diffusion Model Analysis.

When a word is read in a text, the aspects of its meanings that are encoded should be those relevant to the text and not those that are irrelevant. We tested whether older adults, college students, and adults with poor literacy skills accomplish contextually relevant encoding. Participants read short stories, which were followed by true/false test sentences. Among these were sentences that matched the relevant meaning of a word in a story and sentences that matched a different meaning. We measured the speed and accuracy of responses to the test sentences and used a decision model to separate the information that a reader encodes from the reader's speed/accuracy tradeoff settings. We found that all three groups encoded meanings as contextually relevant. The findings illustrate how a decision-making model combined with tests of particular comprehension processes can lead to further understanding of reading skills.

Language Abilities, Phonological Awareness, Reading Skills, and Subjective Fatigue in School-Age Children With Mild to Moderate Hearing Loss

Although reading outcomes for children with hearing loss are improving, too many of these children continue to display persistent reading difficulties. Because of these difficulties, there is an ongoing need to understand the nature of the relationships among decoding abilities, language skills, and reading achievement in this population more fully. Coincidentally, there has also been an emerging literature on the subjective fatigue in children with hearing loss, which could be directly or indirectly linked to reading ability. The purpose of this study was to examine associations among language abilities, reading skills, and subjective fatigue in 56 children with mild to moderate hearing loss (CMMHL). The results indicated that both phonological awareness and receptive language ability predicted reading achievement in CMMHL, which replicates findings for children without hearing loss. The results also indicated that CMMHL who had poor reading skills reported significantly higher levels of subjective fatigue relative to the other children with mild to moderate hearing loss in the sample.

Respecting Students, Acquiring Humility,and Ignoring the Curriculum

There is much talk and theorizing these days about narrative techniques and prescriptive approaches to love in the classroom and education at large as though these were new and novel methodologies. This paper as a voice(s) inside a secondary school seeks to address this issue indirectly through the experience of a teacher who has been given a classroom full of problematic grade 11 students. These students, for all practical purposes, are no longer cared for by their respective school system and they, in turn, have also given up on that system as well. They are all segregated on the basis of their poor reading skills and lack of self- discipline into a classroom that no one wants to teach. The highly unwanted job is given to a neophyte teacher, the author of this paper too many years ago, who ultimately has little choice in the matter. This teacher is highly unsuccessful in the beginning because he develops an intense dislike for these students in order to cope with their outward and self-destructive tendencies. In turn , in order to cope with his inadequacy and anxiety in teaching these students successfully. he pictures himself being ridded of them even in his dreams. Only with his emergent respect, humility, a disregard for the required curriculum and a love for his students that is ultimately reciprocated by them do they all learn to work together in a harmonious manner. Through ancient history, the opera, provocative literature and a special fieldtrip the teacher discovers that he has more to learn from his students than they could ever learn from him.

Calling for translation literacy

AbstractWhen Danish university students write essays, project reports or theses in their L1, based on a reading of sources in English as an L2, a covert interlingual translation process takes place when summarizing, paraphrasing or synthesizing the sources. Unfortunately, due to poor L2 reading skills as well as general translation competences, the English source texts risk being mistranslated in such a way that they are misrepresented. Thus, I suggest that we address the need for translation literacy, this being viewed as an academic skill, a language awareness learning process and a discourse practice in the international university context, which is increasingly relying on research published in English.Based on an empirical analysis of student academic writing, I argue that translation literacy is needed when teaching academic reading-for-writing in higher education in general. Mastering translation competences may facilitate more in-depth understanding of the foreign language sources used as well as raise students’ intercultural awareness in a multilingual world at large.

The current status of the magnocellular theory of developmental dyslexia

Some people doubt that the concept of developmental dyslexia (DD) is useful at all because the phonological weaknesses seen in DD cannot be distinguished from those found in every person with poor reading skills, whatever their cause. Here I argue that true DD is characterised by poor temporal processing, hence impaired visual and auditory sequencing, that is caused by impaired development of transient/magnocellular (M-) systems throughout the brain. These deficits can be measured in order to distinguish the causes of the phonological weaknesses in DD from those causing similar deficits in other types of poor reading. Importantly this knowledge can be exploited to develop effective improvements in treatment. The evidence for impaired visual magnocellular function in many, if not all, people with dyslexia is now overwhelming; it is supported not only by psychophysical tests of M- function, but also by electrophysiological, eye movement, attentional, imaging, interventional and genetic findings. Analogously, auditory temporal processing is mediated by auditory transient, 'magnocellular', processing systems, and evidence is accumulating persuasively that this system is also impaired in dyslexics. I briefly introduce the idea that 'motor magnocellular systems' may also be impaired in dyslexia, then consider genetic, immunological and nutritional factors that interact to cause the impaired magnocellular phenotype. I then discuss why the dyslexic phenotype is so common by speculating about what strengths it might confer that would maintain the responsible genes in the human genome.

Role of Content Schema in Reading Comprehension Among Saudi EFL Students: EFL Teachers’ Perspective and Use of Appropriate Classroom Strategies

This empirical survey investigates the perceptions of English language teachers towards the role of content schemata in reading comprehension among Saudi EFL learners. Furthermore, it also attempts to explore the use of appropriate classroom strategies employed by English language teachers to activate content schemata to enhance learners’ reading comprehension. A modified Likert-scale strongly-agree to strongly-disagree questionnaire was administered to 61 male and female EFL faculty from English Language Center (ELC), Taif University to generate data. The findings have reinforced that background knowledge of Saudi EFL learners help them significantly in reading faster with better understanding. It has also been reported that pre-reading strategies of brainstorming, classroom discussions about the topic and questioning are the most favored ones to activate Saudi EFL learners’ background knowledge. It has also been learnt that while-reading strategies of directing the students’ attention to signal words, main idea, important phrases, titles, subtitles and effectively linking the target text to their students’ cultural and social experiences also contribute towards reading comprehension. The findings have also revealed that English language teachers consider low English language proficiency and poor reading skills of Saudi ELF leaners as well as the lack of appropriate teaching aids as the major obstacles in activating the content schemata. Several recommendations have been forwarded which have significant pedagogical implications in materializing much sought-after goal of effective ELT in the KSA by ensuring better reading skills among Saudi EFL learners.

Foetal growth restriction is associated with poor reading and spelling skills at eight years to 10 years of age

目的 胎儿生长受限(foetal growth restriction，FGR)与交流异常有关，可导致读写能力差。比较24至40周的FGR和同胎龄适于胎龄儿(appropriate for gestational age，AGA)出生的8到10岁时的读写能力。 方法 这是一项前瞻性队列研究，纳入1998至2001年芬兰的一个区域监护中心中37名FGR和31名AGA出生儿童。用二年级和三年级学生使用的芬兰语标准化考试评估儿童的阅读和拼写能力。 结果 FGR小组比AGA小组有更多儿童的阅读和拼写能力低于正常值的第十百分位。9岁FGR儿童的阅读能力和阅读流利度，阅读准确性和阅读理解能力明显不如AGA对照组。八岁组没有发现组间差异。 结论 FGR与阅读和拼写能力差有关；1/3的FGH儿童在9岁时的阅读和拼写在同龄儿的第10百分位以下。这些结果表明必须连续评估随着FGR儿童年龄增长的语言和识字能力以确保他们获得最好的支持治疗。

The role of rural school libraries on childrens exposure to literacy in the Namibian context

The link between libraries and reading development has been found to be a determining factor in literacy development by scholars the world over. Based on the findings of a study on the constraints encountered by teachers in teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) in rural combined schools in the Oshana region, this paper analyses the role of school libraries in rural schools in Namibia. The study made use of the qualitative approach to investigate some of the causes of ineffective teaching and learning in rural schools. Each year, the Directorate of National Examinations and Assessments (DNEA) reveals poor academic performance in the National Senior Secondary Certificate examinations, particularly in the English subject. This study found that poor learner reading skills coupled with learners’ limited access to reading materials constrained the teaching of ESL. Although there were libraries at each school that participated in the study, physical set-up of the libraries often did not qualify them to be libraries in a prototypical definition of a library. It is introspection worthy to examine the role of these rural school libraries on children’s exposure to literacy in an environment of limited reading materials.

Effects of a Syllable-Based Reading Intervention in Poor-Reading Fourth Graders.

In transparent orthographies, persistent reading fluency difficulties are a major cause of poor reading skills in primary school. The purpose of the present study was to investigate effects of a syllable-based reading intervention on word reading fluency and reading comprehension among German-speaking poor readers in Grade 4. The 16-session intervention was based on analyzing the syllabic structure of words to strengthen the mental representations of syllables and words that consist of these syllables. The training materials were designed using the 500 most frequent syllables typically read by fourth graders. The 75 poor readers were randomly allocated to the treatment or the control group. Results indicate a significant and strong effect on the fluency of recognizing single words, whereas text-level reading comprehension was not significantly improved by the training. The specific treatment effect provides evidence that a short syllable-based approach works even in older poor readers at the end of primary school.

Children and adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder cannot move to the beat

Children and adults with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) fail in simple tasks like telling whether two sounds have different durations, or in reproducing single durations. The deficit is linked to poor reading, attention, and language skills. Here we demonstrate that these timing distortions emerge also when tracking the beat of rhythmic sounds in perceptual and sensorimotor tasks. This contrasts with the common observation that durations are better perceived and produced when embedded in rhythmic stimuli. Children and adults with ADHD struggled when moving to the beat of rhythmic sounds, and when detecting deviations from the beat. Our findings point to failure in generating an internal beat in ADHD while listening to rhythmic sounds, a function typically associated with the basal ganglia. Rhythm-based interventions aimed at reinstating or compensating this malfunctioning circuitry may be particularly valuable in ADHD, as already shown for other neurodevelopmental disorders, such as dyslexia and Specific Language Impairment.

EFFECTS OF COGNITIVE RESTRUCTURING AND PROBLEM SOLVING STRATEGIES ON READING AND NOTE TAKING OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN ONDO STATE, NIGERIA

ABSTRACT The recurring problem of low academic achievement among secondary school students has been attributed to many factors among which are poor reading skills and note taking behavior which are the concern of this study. The study investigated the effects of cognitive restructuring and problem-solving strategies in the treatment of poor reading skills and note taking among secondary school students in Ondo State. The study adopted quasi experimental pre-test, post-test and control group research design. One hundred and twenty subjects (120) were selected through purposive and stratified random sampling techniques from three secondary schools in Ondo state. One school from each of three senatorial districts of Ondo State. Samples were assigned to three groups: cognitive restructuring, problem–solving and control groups. Each group consisted of forty subjects. Instrument used for the study was Study Habit Inventory (SHI) adapted from Bakare’s Study Habit Inventory (1977). Two hypotheses were tested at 0.05 alpha level. Data collected were analyzed using analysis of co-variance (ANCOVA). Results of the study revealed that there was significant difference in the reading and note taking of experimental group and control group. The treatment strategies: Cognitive Restructuring and Problem-Solving techniques assisted in improving reading and note taking of the respondents. Based on the findings, it was concluded that application of Cognitive Restructuring and Problem-solving Strategies are capable of ameliorating poor reading skills and note taking of secondary school students. Therefore, it was recommended that Teachers, Counsellors, Psychologists, and other stakeholders in education need to embark upon administering cognitive restructuring and problem-solving strategies by training of stakeholders on the two strategies so as to improve reading skills and note-taking to enhance reading culture and good academic performance among students. Keywords : cognitive restructuring, problem solving strategy, note-taking, reading skills.

Foetal growth restriction is associated with poor reading and spelling skills at eight years to 10 years of age.

Foetal growth restriction (FGR) is associated with communication problems, which might lead to poor literacy skills. The reading and spelling skills of eight- to 10-year-old FGR children born at 24-40 gestational weeks were compared with those of their gestational age-matched, appropriately grown (AGA) peers. A prospectively collected cohort of 37 FGR and 31 AGA children was recruited prenatally at a Finnish tertiary care centre during 1998-2001. The children's reading and spelling skills were assessed using standardised tests for Finnish-speaking second and third graders. Significantly more children performed below the 10th percentile normal values for reading and spelling skills in the FGR group than in the AGA group. At nine years of age, the FGR children had significantly poorer performance in word reading skills and reading fluency, reading accuracy and reading comprehension than the AGA controls. No between-group differences were detected at eight years of age. FGR is associated with poor performance in reading and spelling skills. A third of the FGR children performed below the 10th percentile normal values at nine years of age. These results indicate a need to continuously evaluate linguistic and literacy skills as FGR children age to ensure optimal support.

A Reading Model from the Perspective of Japanese Orthography: Connectionist Approach to the Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency

This study presents a computer simulation model of reading in Japanese syllabic kana and morphographic kanji. The model was based on the simulation model developed by Harm and Seidenberg for reading in English. The purpose of building the current model was to verify the validity of the hypothesis of granularity and transparency (HGT) postulated by Wydell and Butterworth, focusing on the granularity dimension. The HGT was developed in order to explain the behavioral dissociation between excellent reading skills in Japanese and poor reading skills in English of an English–Japanese bilingual individual as well as the relatively low incidence of developmental dyslexia in Japan. The current model was successful in simulating the granularity dimension of the HGT. The study also identified several limitations, which need to be addressed in future research.

Poor performance on the retention of phonemes’ serial order in short-term memory reflects young children’s poor reading skills

Abstract The present study aimed to identify crucial factors that underlie phonological representations in short-term memory (STM) of third-graders with different literacy skills. For this purpose, we used the Nonword Repetition Task (NRT) to disentangle the processing of phonemes’ identity and their serial order. We found no evidence that children’s literacy skills are linked to their capacity for retaining phonemes’ identity. However, their literacy skills are linked to their capacity for retaining phonemes’ serial order. The latter link can be interpreted in terms of a domain-general STM mechanism but is also compatible with the impact of literacy on children’s knowledge of the phonotactic regularities in a language.

Adults With Poor Reading Skills and the Inferences They Make During Reading

ABSTRACT Millions of U.S. adults lack the literacy skills needed for most living-wage jobs. We investigated one particular comprehension process for these adults: generating predictive inferences. If a sentence says that someone falls from a 14th-story roof, a reader should infer almost certain death. On any test of comprehension, there are two dependent variables: the speed of the response to a test item and accuracy. To address both simultaneously, we used a decision model that separates how much information an individual understands from a text and the individual’s speed/accuracy trade-off settings. We found that adult literacy students do differentiate between predictive inference sentences and control sentences, a finding that illustrates how a decision-making model combined with tests of particular comprehension processes can lead to further understanding of low-literacy adults’ reading skills.

DIFFICULT TOPICS AND ACHIEVEMENT IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE: THE PERCEPTION OF SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS AND TEACHERS IN MAKURDI TOWNSHIP, BENUE STATE, NIGERIA

This study determined which topics in the English language curriculum for senior secondary school are perceived by students and teachers as difficult. It also examined difficult topics vis-a-vis English language achievement. Seven research questions were answered using descriptive statistics and two hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance using t-test statistics. The study involving twelve English language teachers and one hundred and eighty seven students was carried out in Makurdi Township, Benue State, Nigeria during the second term of 2015/16 academic session. A self-developed questionnaire with closed-ended items was used to elicit data. Since the researcher relied on the opinion of the respondents for data collection, survey design was chosen as method of research. The results of the analysis showed that out of the 35 topics selected from the SSCE syllabus and prescribed textbooks for English at that level, teachers perceived 14 as difficult topics, while students perceived 22 as difficult topics. The reasons why they were experiencing difficulty with the topics were poor reading and study skills, absence of motivation, hatred for English language, poor experience with the subject, and poor teaching methods. The study recommended remedial teaching of difficult topics, the use of ICT; retraining of teachers, peer teaching, and professionalization of teachers as steps to improve English language teaching and learning. Article visualizations:

Executive Function Variation in Children With Conduct Problems: Influences of Coexisting Reading Difficulties

It is unknown whether children with conduct problems (CP) and poor reading (PR) skills exhibit more profound executive function impairments than children with CP only and whether such impairments are explained by coexisting PR. Executive functions were compared in four groups of 7- to 8-year-old children: 26 CP only, 35 PR only, 27 CP-PR, and 31 comparison (COM) children with neither CP nor PR. The Conners’ Teacher Rating Scale–28 and a sentence completion reading test were used to assess CP and PR skills. The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Third Edition Backward Digit Span, the Conners’ Continuous Performance Test, and the Tower of London were used to assess three aspects of executive function: verbal working memory, response inhibition, and planning, respectively. The CP-PR group had lower verbal working memory than the CP-only and COM groups, but the difference was not significant after intellectual ability, inattention, and hyperactivity were controlled. The CP-PR group made more errors in the planning task (rule violations) than the COM and CP-only groups, but the difference was not significant after intellectual ability was controlled. No significant group differences were found in response inhibition. A specific PR group effect was found for verbal working memory. Children with CP-PR have more prominent executive function impairments that cannot be attributed to coexisting PR.

The Cultivation of Chinese College Students' Reading Ability

It is well recognized that students’ reading skills should be promoted. The acquisition of effective reading ability not only has a positive effect on your individual development but even the whole human society. Yet, it has been observed that many college students in China today have a poor reading skill. Based on the results of previous research, this paper introduces current situation for Chinese college students’ reading ability and analyses the existed problem and influence factors as well. The paper is rounded off with suggestions from certain aspects as to what we can do to make college students become autonomous learners and make a further development of the reading culture in China.

From The Editors

From The Editors