Reading Comprehension Research Articles

Developmental Trajectories of Reading Ability in Adolescents with Intellectual Disabilities

ABSTRACT Individuals with ID often struggle with decoding and reading comprehension, and some studies indicate that these students do not progress beyond the early stages of decoding development. The aim of this study was to investigate the developmental trajectories of reading abilities in relation to mental age in a sample of 136 adolescents with mild, non-specific ID. Decoding and reading comprehension, together with their predictors of phonological awareness, RAN, phonological working memory, and vocabulary, were fitted against mental age. The results showed that, after 105 months, there was an unexpected plateau in the development of decoding, phonological awareness, rapid automatised naming (RAN), and phonological working memory in this sample, while reading comprehension and vocabulary continued to show growth in relation to mental age. The implications of these different trajectories are discussed in relation to developmental models of disability, and possible reasons for the plateau in decoding are suggested.

The impact of computer‐assisted and direct strategy teaching on reading comprehension

The impact of computer‐assisted and direct strategy teaching on reading comprehension

Exploring teachers teaching reading comprehension: knowledge, behaviours and attitudes

ABSTRACT There are few measures of teacher professional knowledge of reading comprehension, therefore little is known about the levels of teacher professional knowledge, their motivation and attitudes to teaching reading comprehension. The Knowledge, Behaviour and Attitudes Test for Reading Comprehension (KBAT-RC) was developed from a systematic literature review, in collaboration with researchers and practitioners. Findings from the first sample suggest that teachers prefer more tangible practices when teaching reading comprehension (teaching vocabulary, prediction and asking questions), in contrast to developing the inference skills and self-monitoring for meaning strategies of the children they teach. Implications for the development of teacher professional knowledge in reading comprehension are discussed.

Enhancing Vocabulary Acquisition and Reading Comprehension in Intermediate Chinese: A Corpus-Driven Approach for International Students

This study investigates the effectiveness of corpus-driven thematic vocabulary teaching methods for intermediate Chinese reading, focusing on enhancing learning outcomes for international students. Utilizing the BCC corpus and Wordless software, a quasi-experimental design with 60 participants was employed. The study combined qualitative analysis of corpus data with quantitative assessment of learning outcomes. Results indicate significant improvements in vocabulary acquisition (p < .001, d = 1.34) and reading comprehension (p < .001, d = 1.13). Qualitative data revealed enhanced learner autonomy and engagement. This research contributes to the field of e-learning by showcasing how corpus technology can be effectively integrated into language instruction, particularly in cross-cultural contexts.

Research on Narrative Reading Teaching Strategies in Upper Elementary Grades of Elementary Chinese Textbooks under the Concept of Learning Task Groups

This study delves into the strategies of teaching narrative text reading in higher grades of primary school under the Unified Edition Chinese Textbook, guided by the concept of Learning Task Groups. The concept, a novel educational approach, emphasizes designing a series of interconnected, progressively deepening learning tasks to stimulate students' interest in learning and foster their comprehensive thinking and learning abilities. Through methods such as questionnaires, interviews, and classroom observations, the study comprehensively analyzes the current state of narrative text reading instruction in higher grades. It highlights the challenges faced by teachers in designing and implementing learning tasks and proposes targeted improvement strategies. The implementation of the Learning Task Groups concept, as evidenced by specific case studies and practices, has been shown to effectively enhance students' reading comprehension, language expression, and innovative and critical thinking abilities. Despite challenges like limited resources and individual differences among students, the study suggests that enhancing teachers' professional capabilities and optimizing educational resources can further promote the effectiveness of teaching strategies. Finally, the paper provides comprehensive suggestions for education policymakers, educators, and frontline teachers, emphasizing the need to focus on the holistic development of students, advocating innovative teaching methods, and improve the quality of education to nurture well-rounded individuals equipped with critical thinking, innovative capabilities, and a sense of social responsibility.

A program based on the semantic approach and its effectiveness in developing reading comprehension skills of the Qur’anic text and religious values among non-Arabic speaking students

A program based on the semantic approach and its effectiveness in developing reading comprehension skills of the Qur’anic text and religious values among non-Arabic speaking students

Korelasi antara Penguasaan Kosakata dengan Kemampuan Membaca Pemahaman Siswa Kelas V Sekolah Dasar

This research aims to determine the correlation between vocabulary mastery and the reading comprehension ability of class V Khuldi Islamic Elementary School students at Al-Azhar 21 Pontianak. The sample used was 20 students of class V Khuldi at Al-Azhar Islamic Elementary School 21 Pontianak using purposive sampling technique. The data collection technique used is a test technique using multiple choice questions to measure students' vocabulary mastery and students' reading comprehension abilities. Data analysis techniques carried out using statistical analysis with a significance level of 5% show the results that there is a correlation between vocabulary mastery and students' reading comprehension ability with r-value 0.985 > critical r-value 0.444. based on these data, it is concluded that there is a correlation between vocabulary mastery and students' reading comprehension abilities as the calculated r-value > critical r-value.

The Effectiveness of the Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) Strategy in Jordanian EFL Tenth-Grade Students’ Reading Comprehension

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate to what extent the Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) strategy affects Jordanian EFL tenth grade students' reading comprehension. Methods: The study followed the quasi-experimental design, which is based on a one-group pre- and post-test design (repeated measures) to measure the dependent variable before the treatment was implemented and once it was implemented. The treatment lasted for eight weeks during the first semester of the academic year 2021–2022. The sample of the study consisted of 30 male students in the tenth grade who were purposefully selected from Turra Secondary School in Al-Ramtha Directorate of Education. To achieve its objectives, a DRTA-based instructional program and a pre- and post-reading comprehension test were developed. The results were statistically analyzed using SPSS. Results: The study results showed that using DRTA made a statistically significant difference (at α = 0.05) between the mean scores on the pre-test and the post-test. They also showed improvement in the sample’s reading comprehension resulting from the reading activities in which the participants were involved in the program. Conclusions: The study recommended using DRTA to improve students’ reading comprehension. The study concluded that using DRTA is an effective learning strategy for improving students' comprehension. DRTA combines four techniques: predicting, reading, confirming or refuting, and justifying. These techniques are used to enhance reading comprehension.

Metacognitive Knowledge: The Effect of Strategy Evaluation Matrix on University Students’ Reading Comprehension Performance

Understanding written texts is problematic for many university students studying English as a Foreign Language. It is not just about having an extensive vocabulary; students also need tools and strategies to comprehend expository texts. One such tool is the Strategy Evaluation Matrix (SEM), which integrates cognitive strategies and metacognitive knowledge. Research has shown that SEM significantly enhances students' reading comprehension performance. By utilizing SEM, students can improve their understanding of written texts. This study aims to investigate the impact of SEM on students’ reading comprehension performance. To achieve this, a post-test-only nonequivalent control group design was used. Two intact groups from the first semester at the Faculty of Languages, Letters, and Arts, Kenitra, Morocco (FLLAK) were selected. The sample consisted of 66 students in both the control and the experimental groups, using a convenient sampling technique. Data for this study were collected using a TOEFL iBT reading comprehension practice test (i.e. the post-test). Results were analyzed using SPSS version 29 and indicated a significant difference between the experimental and the control groups. Students who were instructed to use SEM while reading and answering comprehension questions scored higher compared to those who did not use it. Therefore, employing SEM in reading comprehension indicates that our educational system should consider integrating psychological tools and theories in the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language, specifically in the domain of reading comprehension.

Reading Motivation and Achievement in Online Extensive Reading of English Text: A Systematic Review

The effect that online extensive reading (ER) of English texts has on learners' reading comprehension and motivation to read is not well understood. The purpose of this systematic review was to examine the efficacy of online ER by examining quantitative and mixed-methods studies that examined the effect of online ER on learners' reading achievement, motivation to read, and other perceptual and emotional aspects of English language proficiency. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) criteria were followed in this study. Online ER-related articles were selected based on the predefined eligibility criteria. Then, the 31 English-language online ER studies published between 2010 and 2021 were screened and extracted from electronic databases. The screened studies were those that involved students above 15 years of age. The findings indicated that online ER activities could be used in two ways. First, teachers could incorporate online reading strategies and technological tools for online ER to help students improve their reading achievement. Second, if they wanted to increase their students' motivation to read, they could emphasize the use of online reading management systems and reading resources for ER. Additionally, the study discovered that the size of the vocabulary and the volume of reading were predictors of online ER's success. Additionally, the article discusses the review's implications.

Scaffolding Learners’ Comprehension in Extensive Reading

The present study serves as an insightful teaching summary that focuses on students’ reading comprehension, through investigating the effectiveness and application of a teacher’s scaffolding in a one-semester extensive reading course. The teacher provides scaffolding throughout an entire semester of the extensive reading course. Students’ performance on multiple-choice questions of the first as well as the last unit has been collected and analyzed to determine whether they have enhanced their reading comprehension abilities or not. Based on the both qualitative and quantitative data, the findings reveal that students’ comprehension competence of extensive reading materials has notably increased after a semester of the teacher’s scaffolding. The result suggests that reading skills such as guessing, outlining, identifying topic sentence of each paragraph and determining the main idea of a passage can be applied as effective scaffolding techniques in extensive reading courses.

THE ROLE OF NEUROPEDAGOGY IN TEACHING PRIMARY CLASS STUDENTS TO READ AND UNDERSTAND TEXT

This study explores the impact of neuropedagogy on reading and text comprehension among elementary school students. Neuropedagogy integrates insights from neuroscience with traditional educational practices, aiming to enhance cognitive engagement and learning efficiency. The research involved a controlled experimental design with two groups: one receiving traditional teaching methods and the other exposed to neuropedagogical strategies. Results indicate significant improvements in the neuropedagogy group, with enhanced reading speed, comprehension, and cognitive reflection. These findings suggest that tailored educational approaches that align with neurocognitive development can significantly improve elementary students' literacy skills.

THE CURRENT STATE AND PROSPECTS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERATURE

This research will present findings from an experimental study, carried out at Abai Kazakh Na-tional Pedagogical University, focusing on how graphic novels influence the reading comprehen-sion Student’s abilities in the literature department. It will detail the implementation of activities before, during, and after reading for both groups engaging with traditional texts and graphic novels, along with the students' feedback on these practices. Consequently, we aim to demonstrate the po-tential of integrating graphic novels as a genuine resource within reading courses to enhance (criti-cal) reading skills.This article represents the positive influnence of graphic novels on reading comprehension by experimental study of students, comparing the results between traditional and graphic formats. This research allows to understand the importance of using graphic novels in the current ededucational framework. According to analysis the students' academic performance presented in their GPA scores, and their reading habits. The observation demonstrated that students with higher GPA scores as general rule exhibit a manifestly elevated frequency of engagement with Graphic Novels. Graphic novels use in the visual art and traditional test to motivate the reluctant readers.They permit deeper comprehension of mate-rials that offer to realize both narrative and visual cues.

Teaching reading in digital era: Exploring Indonesian in-service teachers’ perceptions and challenges

This illustrative case study investigation was conducted to learn how Indonesian in-service teachers perceived teaching reading in a digital era and the challenges they encountered. The data were submitted by a total of 30 teachers who participated in the subject post for Indonesian junior high schools. Data collection strategies include participatory classroom observation, interviews, and guided written reflection. The data were analyzed using the constant comparative method. The study’s findings highlight issues concerning teachers’ perceptions and teachers’ challenges while teaching reading in a digital setting. As many as 63% of teachers believe that the proportion of time teachers spend to practice reading skills from online sources is 40%–50% of total teaching hours at school. Furthermore, 40% of them believe that the criteria for teacher success in reading is when pupils improve their reading comprehension skills. The analysis also revealed that teachers encountered a number of challenges: (1) lack of knowledge about models and media for learning to read in a digital context, (2) lack of students’ ability to read multi-text sources, and (3) lack of motivation and awareness among students in reading. The findings of this study impact the understanding and training requirements of junior high school teachers concerning reading instruction methods in a digital context. Future studies should focus on innovation and the development of learning models to improve the quality of reading comprehension in a digital environment.

Invariant (or Not) Reading Strategies Between Languages and Genders

This study explores the similarities and differences in reading strategies applied by students to Chinese versus English reading. 842 students responded to a reading strategy inventory in terms of their habits when reading in Chinese versus in English. The result validates the general structure of a reading strategy inventory originally designed for English. The general scale seemed reasonable for Chinese reading as well as English reading. However, gender differences were found on some items. In addition, there was no statistically significant correlation between strategy use and test scores, which is inconsistent with previous research. Besides, we found a strong correlation between English and classical Chinese reading scores, but not between English and modern Chinese reading. Language as L1 or L2, curriculum and restricted test formats may partly explain the low correlations while social and educational environment can contribute to the high correlation observed. This study also serves as a rare example of a complete cycle of invariance test for ordinal data with a repeated design in Mplus. Implications for research and pedagogy were discussed.

Reading comprehension studies in the last decade: global trends and future direction of Indonesia language researches

Reading comprehension studies in the last decade: global trends and future direction of Indonesia language researches

Demonstration-based learning for few-shot biomedical named entity recognition under machine reading comprehension

Objective: Although deep learning techniques have shown significant achievements, they frequently depend on extensive amounts of hand-labeled data and tend to perform inadequately in few-shot scenarios. The objective of this study is to devise a strategy that can improve the model’s capability to recognize biomedical entities in scenarios of few-shot learning.Methods: By redefining biomedical named entity recognition (BioNER) as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) problem, we propose a demonstration-based learning method to address few-shot BioNER, which involves constructing appropriate task demonstrations. In assessing our proposed method, we compared the proposed method with existing advanced methods using six benchmark datasets, including BC4CHEMD, BC5CDR-Chemical, BC5CDR-Disease, NCBI-Disease, BC2GM, and JNLPBA.Results: We examined the models’ efficacy by reporting F1 scores from both the 25-shot and 50-shot learning experiments. In 25-shot learning, we observed 1.1% improvements in the average F1 scores compared to the baseline method, reaching 61.7%, 84.1%, 69.1%, 70.1%, 50.6%, and 59.9% on six datasets, respectively. In 50-shot learning, we further improved the average F1 scores by 1.0% compared to the baseline method, reaching 73.1%, 86.8%, 76.1%, 75.6%, 61.7%, and 65.4%, respectively.Conclusion: We reported that in the realm of few-shot learning BioNER, MRC-based language models are much more proficient in recognizing biomedical entities compared to the sequence labeling approach. Furthermore, our MRC-language models can compete successfully with fully-supervised learning methodologies that rely heavily on the availability of abundant annotated data. These results highlight possible pathways for future advancements in few-shot BioNER methodologies.

Simulation study: Seeking fairness in a high-stakes placement test

The primary objective of Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment (CDA) lies in problem solving processes to systematically categorize test takers in mastery/non-mastery groups. What is of concern is using some attributes in reading comprehension test item options which are suspected to bias, and is simulating unbiased test items in a reversed engineering attempt. To this end, 4200 PhD candidates who sat for the examination were randomly selected. A Q-matrix was constructed, and raw data were fed into the R-studio software. Two groups of female and male differences were considered for the Differential Item Functioning (DIF) detection based on the Deterministic Inputs, Noisy “and” Gate (DINA) model. Results of the simulation study revealed that in 100 times of item generations, items were non-significant in favor of gender bias. In conclusion, this study was an attempt to determine whether an item identified with DIF is a correct detection or failed to be identified in fine-grained details.

Enhancing Inferential Reading Comprehension Skills through Illustrated Reading Texts

Enhancing Inferential Reading Comprehension Skills through Illustrated Reading Texts

Mental Models: Aid in Improving Reading Comprehension of Grade 6 Struggling Readers

Mental Models: Aid in Improving Reading Comprehension of Grade 6 Struggling Readers