Reading Of Text Research Articles

Textual form features for text readability assessment

Abstract Text readability assessment aims to automatically evaluate the degree of reading difficulty of a given text for a specific group of readers. Most of the previous studies considered it as a classification task and explored a wide range of linguistic features to express the readability of a text from different aspects, such as semantic-based and syntactic-based features. Intuitively, when the external form of a text becomes more complex, individuals will experience more reading difficulties. Based on this motivation, our research attempts to separate the textual external form from the text and investigate its efficiency in determining readability. Specifically, in this paper, we introduce a new concept, namely textual form complexity, to provide a novel insight into text readability. The main idea is that the readability of a text can be measured by the degree to which it is challenging for readers to overcome the distractions of external textual form and obtain the text’s core semantics. To this end, we propose a set of textual form features to express the complexity of the outer form of a text and characterize its readability. Findings show that the proposed external textual form features can be used as effective evaluation indexes to indicate the readability of text. It brings a new perspective to the existing research and provides a new complement to the existing rich features.

Осознание языковой нормы студентами-логопедами как фактор готовности к работе в инклюзивной образовательной среде

<p>The work is aimed at studying the formation of language reflection and the peculiarities of awareness of the language norm by speech therapy students as an indicator of their readiness to work with children with disabilities. The research materials obtained from a sample of first-year students of the Faculty of Defectology of the Moscow State University (N=450; EG=100) are presented. The study was conducted in 2 stages, including the analysis of video recordings of samples of spontaneous speech and reading texts of varying complexity. The results obtained show the insufficient formation of language reflection and the difficulty of understanding the language norm by future speech therapists. The influence of the complexity of the text on the number and prevalence of errors in the reading test has been determined (with a significance of p<0,001 there are differences in the groups). Purposeful attention to their own speech and the speech of others, recording self-observations helped to increase the number of students who completed the tasks without errors (from 15% to 40%). At the same time, with a significance of p<0,001, it was revealed that students are better at detecting errors during self-control than testing others. The study proposes ways of improving the language reflection of the students for their better formation for working in an inclusive environment.</p>

How to determine the readability of a physics text

How to determine the readability of a physics text

Narratives on the curricularization of cross cultural management and contributions to the internationalization of higher education

IntroductionThe objective of the research was to argue about the urgency of the Curricularization of Cross-Cultural Management, to provide better preparation for students in the face of social, economic and political dynamics.MethodsThe research takes a qualitative approach and uses a revisional methodology, considering articles published on the Web of Science and Scopus, with a search conducted in July 2024, with the descriptor “Cross-Cultural Management” considering the period from 2012 to 2024.ResultsThe narrative literature review was used, while the reading and choice of texts for the research corpus considered attention to the CCM approach, contributing to the construction of the argument about the curricularization of cross-cultural management.DiscussionIt is concluded that research and teaching on contemporary cross cultural management need to reflect on the varied worldviews and different paradigms, with attention to (i) digital transformation and virtual education; (ii) learning, connectivism, and formative experience; (iii) knowledge management and communities of practice; and (iv) conflict management.

Associating cognitive abilities with naturalistic search behavior

AbstractDifferences in cognitive abilities affect search behaviors, but this has mostly been observed in laboratory experiments. There is limited research on how users search for information in real‐world, naturalistic settings and how real‐world search behaviors relate to cognitive abilities. In this study, we investigated a wide range of behavioral data captured from real‐life search tasks, their association with users' cognitive abilities, and the potential for automatically inferring cognitive abilities from these data. Furthermore, we aimed to determine the data quantity and monitoring duration needed to effectively estimate cognitive abilities from naturalistic behavior. Twenty individuals with βvarying cognitive abilities participated in the experiments in which their everyday search behavior was continuously recorded for 14 days. Their cognitive ability was evaluated through standard tests conducted individually. Data consisted of over 800 h of monitoring, including 2022 queries extracted from 1,442,447 screen frames and associated operating system logs. Using these data, naturalistic search behaviors were associated with cognitive abilities, and predictive models were trained. The results showed that lower selective attention was found to be associated with longer dwelling on selected search results. Faster psychomotor speed and higher fluid intelligence were found to be associated with a greater amount of text read on selected pages. Predictive models exhibited small error rates in predicting cognitive abilities.

Caribbean Confederations as Relationalities

In this essay, I connect my work on Archipelago studies with Édouard Glissant’s notions of relationality and Caribbean confederations to formulate what I denominate as the erotics of archipelagic thinking. My main goal is to share my process of thinking with and through Glissant’s work to focus on a series of theoretical gestures that have allowed me to propose modes of reading literary depictions of Caribbean con/federations that go beyond the binary opposition between colonialism and nationalism. I am performing an exercise that I assign to my students when I teach the “Introduction to Critical Theory” course at the University of Miami. Instead of writing an essay with a short theoretical introduction followed by a detailed close reading of literary and cultural texts that illustrate a keyword or a theoretical insight, I conduct a methodological meditation in which I theorize the archipelagic as a form of relationality that configures an erotic imaginary beyond the nuclear family and towards affective networks. To think about the Caribbean as an archipelagic formation, I use my comparative work on the Antillean Confederation in the Hispanic Caribbean (1860-1898) and the West Indies Federation in the English Caribbean (1958-1962) as a historical context in which the region congealed as a network of locations “act[ing] in concert."

Nineteenth-century narratives of addiction: Relational harm and the child as witness

Through close reading of medical and cultural texts, this article demonstrates how the narrativisation of relational harm underpinned the emerging categorisation of ‘addiction’ in the 19th century: excessive consumption was conceived through its detrimental impact upon others, and more specifically, upon the family. The problem was portrayed as physiological, psychological, and social: ‘addiction’ could not be located securely within a single individual, nor was it conceived simply as a social vice. While other societal themes emerge in the medical writing of the period, such as the relationship between drinking and criminality, and the visibility of drinking in the working-classes, these are not presented as proto-diagnostic criteria in the same way as relational harm. In theorising addiction, medicine relied upon rhetorical devices and narrative modes, and authors and artists took an active role in defining the terms of the debate around drinking, drug use, and gambling. Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank represent childhood through the adult's compulsive behaviour, which the child witnesses, while the adult's behaviour itself is conceived as harm directed towards child. The article demonstrates how 21st-century attitudes, particularly located in the fields of psychiatric diagnosis and child protection social work, echo debates established by 19th-century narratives, arguing that that the disease model of addiction was closely associated with the medico-legal production of childhood. Nineteenth-century narratives of addiction therefore anticipate late 20th- and 21st-century attitudes regarding the impact of parental substance use upon children.

““The last bastion of democracy”: teachers’ perceptions of the democratic potential of English curriculum”

Purpose Faced with increasing systemic constraints and pressures, secondary school English teachers often implement transactional approaches to pedagogy and curriculum aimed at improving student results on external exams, which are then used to rank schools. Despite the pressure to teach this way, teachers acknowledge the power of literature, literacy and language in the English curriculum as vehicles for educating students to be critical readers of texts for a democratic society. As such, the purpose of this paper is to share perspectives of secondary English teachers in relation to the democratic potential of their subject. Design/methodology/approach Using a qualitative case study method, this paper shares data from six Australian secondary school English teachers who work in culturally diverse schools. Teachers were interviewed about their perspectives regarding how the Australian English curriculum enabled and/or constrained the teaching of critical and creative thinking in support of a democratic society. Findings Using Marri’s model of multicultural democratic education, interview data were deductively analyzed to identify elements of the model, including critical pedagogies, disciplinary content and community building. Teachers were concerned that building critical literacy skills was minimized by the system and students’ personal dispositions. Originality/value The English teachers in this study held a strong belief that the subject of English could emancipate students, although they felt it might be “the last bastion” for a democratic education.

Developing Linguistic Constructs of Text Readability Using Natural Language Processing

ABSTRACT Purpose Understanding what makes a text difficult to read is an important element of literacy instruction, materials development, and research into text readability. Readability formulas are often used to quantify text readability. However, readability formulas often focus on a relatively limited number of text features that inform the reading process and/or use single features to measure complex language constructs under the presumption that related features do not interact with one another. As a result, the formulas can be difficult to interpret by practitioners. Method A principal component analysis was used to combine text features from advanced natural language processing tools into theoretically-inspired language constructs related to text comprehension. Result Results indicate that text features aggregated into seven components related to informational text, syntactic constructions, noun phrase complexity, lexical ease, function word ease, narrativity, and lexical variety. These components predicted 44% of the variance in readability scores reported in a large readability corpus. Conclusion The results provide evidence that individual linguistic features related to text readability can be combined into reading components that are strong predictors of text comprehension. Practically, these components should be more easily interpretable allowing for more actionable feedback and use by practitioners.

Text readability: its impact on reading comprehension and reading time

Recently, the readability of texts has become the focus of reading research because it is believed to have implications for reading comprehension, which is of utmost importance in the field of English as a foreign language (EFL), particularly in the teaching, learning and assessment of reading comprehension. Unfortunately, the influence of text readability on reading comprehension (and reading time) has not been well studied in the EFL context. Most text readability studies are conducted in medical contexts, but these studies are often limited in predicting readability scores for sample texts. To address this gap, the current study aimed to evaluate the influence of text readability levels (based on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level (FKGL)) on students’ reading comprehension and reading time. Data were collected through reading test and analyzed using SPSS version 22. The Friedman test revealed that the distribution of students' reading comprehension score (X2=197.532, p=0.000) and reading time (X2=215.323, p=0.000) are different in each text, suggesting that the readability of texts has a significant influence on both. This study contributed to the practices of reading instruction and assessment. Limitations and suggestions for further research are briefly discussed.

Dialectics of perception and imagination: Embodied politics of atmosphere in Xiqiao Road, Nanjing

In the social media era, scholars tend to reduce the online digital images of cities to readable visual-centric texts dominated by ideologies such as platform capitalism and symbolic consumerism, treating symbols and affects as antagonistic. This study attempts to deconstruct this dichotomy and explain the visual-centric paradigm in digital images from the perspective of affective atmospheres based on an ethnography of 20 participants on Nanjing's Xiqiao Road. Built on atmosphere theory and material imagination theory, we suggest that an embodied politics of atmosphere is constituted by perception and imagination. Perceptions foster a holistic understanding of place among participants through peripheral visions, which is potentially consistent with the logic of online dissemination of digital images. In contrast, material imagination represents the creative pole of the body and establishes a new surface aesthetics of digital images. Faced with visual-centric notions of place in contemporary digital images, illustrating the embodied politics of the affective atmosphere can help motivate people to transcend existing paradigms and experience place through a more creative vision.

The Impact of Blended Mobile Learning on EFL Students’ Vocabulary Development

The study's objective is to examine the effects of Blended Mobile Learning (BML) on the vocabulary development of EFL preparatory students and their views of BML. As a mixed method study, it was conducted with 40 preparatory students at a state university in Turkey. While the control group studied vocabulary by reading texts only in the classroom by adhering to the textbook, the experimental group, in addition to the same instruction, was taught vocabulary outside the classroom in a virtual classroom opened through the Google Classroom application. A pre-test and a post-test were administered to the students to determine the impact of BML on their vocabulary development. The results of the tests were analyzed with SPSS program and the vocabulary development of groups was compared via an independent T-test. Additionally, a structured interview was done with the students of the experimental group to determine their views of BML. Students' responses were analyzed using the MAXQDA 2020 program with the method of content analysis. This research has led to the conclusion that BML, as a teaching method, strengthens the vocabulary development of the preparatory students and motivates them to learn vocabulary.

Academic reading: fear and trembling or being and belonging?

At the University of the West of England (UWE) Bristol, we are in the second year of a project to promote and improve reading skills. One part of our work has focused on embedding collaborative reading techniques within subjects to improve confidence in tackling texts, promote reading as a social practice, and boost belonging within disciplines and cohorts. Our poster presentation reviews the literature on student emotions towards reading, and how these influence their practices. We use this visual representation when liaising with academic colleagues to co-create and facilitate collaborative reading activities. Considerations of the role of student ‘affect’ foreground the motivational dimensions of the reading experience; we look at both pre-existing psychological and emotional barriers to engagement, and incentives and enablers that encourage confident reading and enjoyment of academic texts. We consider how the research literature accords with and further informs our empirical experience of running practical reading workshops. It is hoped that activities such as reading circles and textmapping relieve the individual from sole accountability for comprehension, bringing reading ‘out from the dark’. Deconstructing the process of reading through collaborative roles contributes towards the co-construction of understanding and knowledge, activating fresh insights. Discussion of reading through this shared approach potentially helps to develop student confidence, to nurture feelings of belonging, and to enhance cohort identity. However, we are mindful of the real-world impacts and outcomes of reading strategies for the diverse body of students that we encounter in higher education, with their wealth of difference in cognitive abilities, backgrounds, and cultural experiences. Through this literature review, it is intended that learning from work already published will contribute towards evolving best practice in channelling agency and easing anxiety in academic reading for all students.

The Argumentative Structural Shifts in English-Arabic Translation of BBC News Reports: A Sociolinguistic And Cultural Perspective

The socio-cultural and ideological features of translation have become so prominent that many studies have investigated the translation shifts resulting from the linguistic transference from the source language (SL) into the target language (TL). It is the primary aim of the present article to demonstrate the nature of the structural (morpho-syntactic) shifts in the Arabic written translation of English political British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news, which may be attributable to differences in cultural, ideological and sociolinguistic backgrounds of the target language speakers (Arabic). The heterogeneity of the socio-cultural context in which the English and Arabic political discourses are communicated is reflected in the syntactic shifts in the sentential and phrasal structure in the translation process of BBC News. The target texts (TT) exhibit a substantial tendency to conform to the socio-cultural and ideological context of the target language (TL) at the expense of the morphosyntactic structure of the ST. The research methodology involves analyzing some English BBC news extracts (ST) and their Arabic translation to investigate the structural shifts in translation. The data analysis, conducted with meticulous attention to detail, shows that the Arabic translation alters the (ST) linguistic structures and shifts the socio-cultural and ideological conceptions of the target text (TT) readers. A key aspect of the methodology is the adoption of a comparative approach, which allows for a thorough examination of the structural differences and similarities and their corresponding content. The article also takes cognizance of Hatim's (1997) ideas on translation across different cultures and those of Fishman (1972) on the sociolinguistic reflections of language. The study concludes that the target readers' cultural background, ideological make-up and sociolinguistic perception can be altered due to the structural shifts in translating political news into Arabic. It shows that the structural shifts lead to specific deviations in the argumentative structure of the source text (ST) through argumentation or counter-argumentation.

Prediction in reading: A review of predictability effects, their theoretical implications, and beyond.

Historically, prediction during reading has been considered an inefficient and cognitively expensive processing mechanism given the inherently generative nature of language, which allows upcoming text to unfold in an infinite number of possible ways. This article provides an accessible and comprehensive review of the psycholinguistic research that, over the past 40 or so years, has investigated whether readers are capable of generating predictions during reading, typically via experiments on the effects of predictability (i.e., how well a word can be predicted from its prior context). Five theoretically important issues are addressed: What is the best measure of predictability? What is the functional relationship between predictability and processing difficulty? What stage(s) of processing does predictability affect? Are predictability effects ubiquitous? What processes do predictability effects actually reflect? Insights from computational models of reading about how predictability manifests itself to facilitate the reading of text are also discussed. This review concludes by arguing that effects of predictability can, to a certain extent, be taken as demonstrating evidence that prediction is an important but flexible component of real-time language comprehension, in line with broader predictive accounts of cognitive functioning. However, converging evidence, especially from concurrent eye-tracking and brain-imaging methods, is necessary to refine theories of prediction.

READING MATERIALS IN THE LIFE TODAY ENGLISH BOOK: EFL TEACHERS’ VIEWS

Book is a vital media in EFL Learning process. Life Today book is an English book that becomes one of the primary reading references. However, this book likely has not been widely used by teachers in Indonesia because it is still new. It is interesting to study more on this based on the teachers who have used it. This study examines the reading materials in the English Life Today book of 12 grade in Senior High School level based on EFL Teachers’ view. This research applied mix-method with the use of close-ended and open-ended questionnaires to obtain the opinions of 50 English teachers in Jakarta and some vicinities areas. After gathering the data, the researchers tabulated, analyzed, and interpreted it systematically. The findings showed that 50 EFL teachers dominantly gave positive views towards reading materials in the English Life Today book based on its reading contents aspect, language use, pre-and post-reading, and presentation aspects. The EFL teachers also gave constructive suggestion including the more variation topics need to be added, the extra thesaurus also need to be provided, and the separated reading texts needs to be identified to differentiate low and high students’ level.

Exposure to information about sexual crimes and its relationship to perceptions of social threats and belief in a just world

Purpose The purpose of the two online experimental studies was to examine how information about threats related to sexual crimes influences personal beliefs regarding social threats (in line with the finite pool of worry concept) and belief in a just world, as proposed by Melvin Lerner. Design/methodology/approach In the first experiment (n = 256), female participants were presented with press information about a sexual crime that occurred at a student concert. Different groups were informed whether the perpetrator was apprehended (or not) and asked to indicate the punishment they thought should be imposed. In the second experiment (n = 251), participants in the experimental group were asked to read texts about various threats that may concern them. Findings In both experiments, the authors measured the perceived risk of being a victim of a sexual crime (and, in Study 1, other threats) as well as belief in just world (at both personal and general levels). Analysis of results has shown that participants’ focus on one threat did not reduce their concerns about other threats. However, belief in just world appears to be negatively associated with the fear of being a victim of a sexual crime. Originality/value The findings concern the relationship between the sense of threat and belief in a just world. In this regard, both of the studies consistently showed that the threats the authors induced did not affect the level of belief in a just world. However, the second experiment revealed that belief in a just world is related to the fear of being raped. Belief in a just world serves as a foundation for good adaptation and functioning. It provides cognitive control, motivates hard work and long-term goal-setting and gives life meaning (e.g. Dalbert, 1999; Dalbert and Sallay, 2004; Sutton and Winnard, 2007). Therefore, a woman’s fear of being a victim of rape has implications that extend beyond this narrowly defined issue.

Pre-9/11 Islamophobia: A Contrapuntal Reading of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man reproduces the same Orientalist mantra of the Muslim terrorist. Although he is much celebrated for writing thrilling terrorism and assassination novels long before the 9/11 event, many critics situated his Falling Man within the 9/11 neo-Orientalist framework. This study argues that the 9/11 occurrence (while acknowledging its significance) is not the only trigger behind DeLillo’s representation of Muslims in his novel. As such, the study underscores DeLillo’s ideological inclinations by examining his records and the contextual circumstances that transpired before 9/11. By rereading Falling Man, this study situates the investigation within three parameters: the Iranian Revolution, the Rushdie affair and the Clash of Civilisations thesis, thus appropriating the novel within its Islamophobic implicature. Edward Said’s theory of contrapuntal reading, which urges a nonconventional reading of a canonical text, is employed as the theoretical underpinning of this study.

Text analysis and optimization strategy of an app’s privacy policy from the perspective of dual perception: taking Chinese shopping apps as an example

Purpose This paper aims to conduct an in-depth analysis of the shortcomings of apps’ privacy policies and to propose improvement and optimization strategies, which are of great significance for establishing a transparent and responsible privacy protection framework that ensures compliant collection and use of users’ information and effective protection of their privacy. Design/methodology/approach This paper obtained privacy policy texts for 100 shopping apps through Web crawlers and manual downloads. Based on the perspective of perceived usefulness, thematic analysis is conducted through the latent Dirichlet allocation topic model and comparison with existing policies. Based on the perspective of perceived ease of use, readability analysis is conducted through content analysis and formula calculation. Findings The apps privacy policies can be divided into seven themes. The authors benchmark these seven topics with the Personal Information Protection Law of the People’s Republic of China, the E-Commerce Law of the People’s Republic of China and the General Data Protection Regulation. It is found that there are omissions in the information collection and use and juvenile protection of the existing apps. Through the indicators’ readability analysis and calculation, it is found that the existing apps privacy policies have good performance in the readability indicators such as naming method, frame directory and so on. However, text personalization and text readability need to be improved and optimized. Originality/value At the theoretical level, this paper constructs a model from the dual perception perspectives of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use and analyses the apps’ privacy policy texts at a fine-grained level. At the practical level, based on large-scale apps’ privacy policy text data, this paper conducts multi-dimensional research from theme analysis, authoritative law benchmarking analysis, content analysis and text readability calculation and analysis. At the same time, this paper identifies the current problems of apps’ privacy policies and puts forward countermeasure suggestions for their content improvement and optimization.

Vision assistant for visually impaired individuals

Visually impaired individuals face significant challenges in accessing environmental information, social interactions, and safety in their daily lives. This article aims to increase the independence of visually impaired individuals and simplify their daily lives using an AI-supported image and sound recognition system. The developed prototype is a pair of glasses consisting of a Raspberry Pi 4 microprocessor, integrated headphones, touch controls, and a powerful battery management system. The electronic diagram includes the integration of a camera and microprocessor. The AI algorithms developed successfully perform tasks such as object recognition, text reading, and facial recognition. The article provides a comprehensive literature review and introduces the prototype to visually impaired users. Based on the feedback from the introduction, the prototype's ease of use and effectiveness were evaluated, and improvements were made based on user feedback. The algorithms were tested for accuracy, with the prototype achieving a 78% accuracy score, close to GPT-4's 82%. Additionally, tests with 20 users resulted in an 85% user satisfaction rate.