This open access book provides teachers with approaches to strengthen reading comprehension instruction based on scientific research and evidence-based didactic principles. In this volume, the ...Progress in International Reading Study (PIRLS) framework is used to inform teachers about the skills and knowledge that students need to comprehend certain texts. The book gives practical guidance on how a teacher can help students to learn these skills, specifically, when teaching reading to multilingual students. Good practices from schools in five participating PIRLS countries—Chile, Chinese Taipei, England, Georgia, and Spain—are shared. A description of the schools’ education in reading comprehension is provided with practical tips and example lessons. These insights into daily reading education in multilingual classrooms across the globe can be an inspiration to teachers all over the world.
•Students with specific reading comprehension difficulties (RCD) have deficits in inhibition and working memory.•Across two samples, students with RCD were significantly lower in cognitive ...flexibility than typically developing (TD) peers.•Students with RCD are less able to actively switch between letter-sound information and meaning of print than TD students.•Students with RCD showed no significant reading comprehension growth in response to regular reading instruction.•Supplemental cognitive flexibility intervention resulted in significant gains in reading comprehension for students with RCD.
Substantial research indicates decoding difficulties are a primary contributor to reading comprehension problems. Yet, far less is known about sources of reading comprehension problems when readers' decoding abilities are appropriate for grade level (i.e., specific reading comprehension difficulties; RCD). Executive functioning contributes uniquely to RCD beyond traditional predictors, such as decoding ability and vocabulary. However, of the three core executive functions, working memory and inhibition have received relatively more research attention than cognitive flexibility, even though readers with RCD typically focus inflexibly on decoding processes without attention to meaning. Two studies assessed the contribution of cognitive flexibility to RCD. Study 1 employed a matched sampling approach to examine general and reading-specific cognitive flexibility in 24 readers with RCD and 24 typically developing readers (from a pool of 140 students) at the end of 1st and 2nd grades. Readers with RCD were significantly lower in reading-specific cognitive flexibility than typically developing peers, even when decoding, verbal ability, nonverbal matrix reasoning ability, and vocabulary were controlled; a similar, though not significant, difference emerged for general, color-shape cognitive flexibility. Study 2 revealed a teacher-delivered cognitive flexibility intervention produced significant improvements in reading comprehension for students with RCD (n = 18) who had not shown significant growth prior to intervention; after intervention, their reading comprehension growth was comparable to typically developing controls (n = 21).
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
Las canciones son grandes aliados del aprendizaje, por su contribución a la socialización, memorización y aprendizaje de conceptos. Se trata de una investigación cuasi-experimental, con el objetivo ...de investigar el impacto de las canciones como herramienta de mediación para mejorar el lenguaje y las habilidades básicas de lectura en niños de una escuela brasileña. Se compararon dos grupos, con treinta y un niños. Los datos se recolectaron mediante tres instrumentos. Los resultados apuntan a puntuaciones altas (p≤ 0,001) en todos los dominios de las pruebas realizadas en el grupo experimental, en comparación con los resultados del grupo control. Este resultado indica que la música se consideró un buen instrumento para mejorar el lenguaje y la lectura.
The present investigation deals with individual differences in habitual (trait-level) mind wandering and their effects on learning. We hypothesized that the 'positive-constructive' type of habitual ...mind wandering would promote task-related thinking and the 'poor-attention' type to promote task-unrelated thinking. This hypothesis was tested in a study with 200 participants who rated different aspects of their mind wandering in daily life in one session and completed a reading study in a second session. The reading study included thought probes, retrospective questions about readers' thought contents, and comprehension tests after reading. In line with our hypothesis, data analysis revealed that some forms of positive-constructive mind wandering were positively associated with text-related thought, whereas poor-attention mind wandering was positively associated with text-unrelated thought. The present results add to the literature by emphasizing different types of trait-level mind wandering and their potentially opposite effects on learning.
In order to better evaluate the robustness of Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models, this paper builds three test sets from Dureader by automatically extracting and manually annotating, ...consisting of oversensitivity, over-stability, and generalization. In addition, this paper proposes a multi-task learning framework with answer extraction task and masked position prediction task. Experimental results demonstrate that proposed method gains significant robustness improvements and show the effectiveness of the three test sets on evaluating the robustness of MRC models.
Le premier objectif de cette étude est de déterminer dans quelle mesure les résultats aux tests de compréhension écrite peuvent être prédits par des mesures de la connaissance lexicale chez les ...apprenants japonais de français au niveau A2. Le second est d’identifier les caractéristiques du vocabulaire requis pour acquérir le niveau A2. Pour cela, 48 étudiants ont été soumis à un test de compréhension écrite basé sur un test blanc du DELF A2, suivi d’un test de connaissance des mots portant sur les mêmes textes. Une régression multiple a été effectuée en utilisant le taux de réponses correctes comme variable explicative et le résultat au test comme variable dépendante. L’équation de régression obtenue prédit 73,5% de la variance des résultats au test. Les participants ont été classés en deux groupes : ceux qui ont réussi le test de compréhension de l’écrit et ceux dont les résultats sont insuffisants. Les réponses données par les deux groupes ont été comparées. Nous avons ainsi constaté que ce qui a fait la différence entre la réussite et l’échec sont les taux de réponses correctes pour les prépositions, les mots de fréquence moyenne-basse pouvant être déduits de l’anglais et les mots nécessitant une connaissance culturelle.
Relationship between reading comprehension skills and lexical knowledge at the A2 level in French among Japanese-speaking students
. This study was aimed to determine the extent to which reading comprehension test scores can be predicted by measures of the lexical knowledge of Japanese learners of French at the A2 level, and to identify the characteristics of the vocabulary required to pass the A2 level. A reading comprehension test based on a DELF A2 mock test was administered to 48 university students, followed by a word knowledge test involving the same texts. Multiple regression was performed using the percentage of correct answers as the explanatory variable and the test score as the dependent variable, yielding a regression equation that predicted 73.5% of the variance in test scores. Comparing responses between the group whose reading comprehension test scores reached the passing level and that whose scores did not, we found that it was the percentages of correct responses to prepositions, medium- and low-frequency words that can be inferred from English, and words requiring cultural knowledge that made the difference between passing and failing.
The paper considers reading for comprehension and developing reading culture, showing how reading habits are constantly changing with new technologies dominating our life. Learning English being the ...focus of attention, the author comments on the way reading contributes to language acquisition and language learning. А particular reference is given to types of reading, reading for comprehension being the essence of any. The author reviews reading strategies, stressing the necessity of introducing them to the students. The author analyses some of the language courses and gives examples of work on reading skills at the lessons of English using both the above courses and the ones developed by the teachers of the Ural State University of Economics.
"The current study investigated the effects of inference instruction on text-based inferences by third graders who are below average in reading comprehension but average in reading fluency and ...cognitive abilities. Text-based inferences occur when the preceding text has an identifiable causal antecedent. Participants were randomly assigned and attended twelve 30-minute sessions of the inferences training intervention. We have included strategies for integrating information from the text to improve reading comprehension skills. We provide an overview of how specific text-based instruction influences reading comprehension processes and outcomes and can lead to increased reading comprehension. The comparison of pretest and posttest results in the experimental group showed a significant gain in the following variables: generating inferences and providing arguments for using rules and constraints. Finally, we discuss how consideration of these potential sources of instruction has practical implications for designing and selecting instructional materials. Key-words: reading comprehension, text-based inferences, reading comprehension instruction, inferences, inference instruction, reading comprehension difficulties"
Innovations in annotation methodology have been a catalyst for Reading Comprehension (RC) datasets and models. One recent trend to challenge current RC models is to involve a model in the annotation ...process: Humans create questions adversarially, such that the model fails to answer them correctly. In this work we investigate this annotation methodology and apply it in three different settings, collecting a total of 36,000 samples with progressively stronger models in the annotation loop. This allows us to explore questions such as the reproducibility of the adversarial effect, transfer from data collected with varying model-in-the-loop strengths, and generalization to data collected without a model. We find that training on adversarially collected samples leads to strong generalization to non-adversarially collected datasets, yet with progressive performance deterioration with increasingly stronger models-in-the-loop. Furthermore, we find that stronger models can still learn from datasets collected with substantially weaker models-in-the-loop. When trained on data collected with a BiDAF model in the loop, RoBERTa achieves 39.9F
on questions that it cannot answer when trained on SQuAD—only marginally lower than when trained on data collected using RoBERTa itself (41.0F
).
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