The goal of the current study is to explore the influence of knowledge on socioeconomic discrepancies in word learning and comprehension. After establishing socioeconomic differences in background knowledge (Study 1), the authors presented children with a storybook that incorporates this knowledge (Study 2). Results indicated that middle-income…

Forty-four children, identified by their kindergarten teachers as independent readers upon public school entrance, were interviewed to assess their perceptions of how and when they learned to read. In addition to interviews, the children's literacy behaviors were observed in their normal classroom settings and in individual shared book…

The goal of this investigation was to determine which reading instruction improves multiple science text comprehension for college student readers. The authors first identified the cognitive processing strategies that are predictive of multiple science text comprehension (Study 1) and then used what they learned to experimentally test the…

This article reports a lexical-decision experiment that was conducted to investigate the impact of word stress on visual word recognition in German. Reaction-time latencies and error rates of German readers on different levels of reading proficiency (i.e., third graders and fifth graders from primary school and university students) were compared…

This study examined the effects of text type and early familiarization with oral expository text structures on listening and reading comprehension levels. Second-grade students read and listened to narrative and expository texts, and their comprehension was assessed with a sentence verification task. Half of the students had participated in a…

This study highlights the complex reading processes of two primary grade struggling readers. It provides a more complete picture of the readers' use of all parts of a text, verbal and visual, to construct meaning during reading. The oral reading data show that students used various linguistic strategies to read words, and the eye-tracking data…

The simple view of reading admits two components in accounting for individual differences in reading comprehension: a print-dependent component related to decoding and word identification, and a print-independent one related to oral language comprehension. It has been debated whether word or nonword reading is a better index of the print-dependent…

We examined the influence of seductive detail sentences (i.e., highly interesting, yet unimportant sentences) on reading time and recall for readers with higher and lower verbal ability. College students (n = 81) read a 967-word text that included seductive detail sentences. Participants with higher and lower verbal ability displayed similar…

The theoretical and practical implications of examining young children's acquisitions of phonological awareness skills with specific and differentiated processing tasks are explored in this study. The study presents data from 269 kindergarten children completing a phonological awareness protocol that provided information on 14 discrete…

Research on subject matter instruction across the 20th century (e.g., Stevens, 1912; Bellack, 1966; Hoetker & Ahlbrand; 1969; Gall, 1970; Langer, 1999; Mehan, 1979; Nystrand, 1997;) reveals a preponderance of teacher-directed lecture, recitation, and round-robin reading of text in place of instruction that focuses on reading-to-learn, thinking,…

To examine metacomprehension during comprehension, undergraduates (n = 133) were asked to provide descriptions of how they determined the meaning of four rare words presented in short passages. Content analysis of these written descriptions revealed task-specific metacomprehension reflecting lexical, textbase, and situation model processes.…

Parsimonious models of word recognition and reading comprehension were validated in a sample of third-grade readers. Word recognition was modeled as phonological awareness, decoding skill, and word processing rate. This model demonstrated the importance of unitization of letter clusters for efficient word reading. A curvilinear relation between…

Nassaji and Geva (1999) concluded that lower level processes, particularly efficiency in phonological and orthographic processing contributed significantly to individual differences in adult ESL reading. Moreover, they reported that speed of letter naming, while not directly associated with reading comprehension, was related to linguistic…

In order to probe the relationship between reading strategies and comprehension monitoring strategies and how they function to help readers in comprehension process, the present study utilizes think-aloud and retrospective verbal reports to examine 20 EFL readers' performances in reading texts. The results reveal that the engagement of reading…

First and second grade public school teachers were trained through interactive video-conferencing to implement "Language Enrichment," an Orton-Gillingham-based literacy instruction. The effectiveness of the linguistically informed training was demonstrated by documenting the longitudinal third grade reading comprehension achievement of their…