With remediation of the printed book into audiobook subscription services, reading by listening is becoming a popular alternative to reading by seeing. This article explores when people read by ...listening and whether there may be a shift regarding the places and times people read by listening rather than by seeing. Based on a considerable dataset from a Swedish subscription service for digital books, this article reveals that audiobook reading takes place at somewhat different times than expected and that subscribers read significant amounts each day. The findings indicate that the remediation into reading by listening using digital audiobooks may close the gender gap common in reading, as the reading practices of men and women are very similar, with men even reading slightly more than women. The reading practices of young adults are also similar to the larger population. Furthermore, the concepts stationary reading, mobile reading and stationary/mobile reading are introduced.
Background
Children with dyslexia often show second‐language reading and writing difficulties, but the cognitive mechanisms connected to this impairment need to be clarified.
Aims
The present study ...examined the neuropsychological mechanisms underlying learning English as a foreign language in 4th‐ to the 8th‐grade Italian students showing reading difficulties (RD) or typical development (TD). For this purpose, screening involving 901 students was carried out to select children with RD.
Sample
Ninety students with RD were compared with 90 typically developing (TD) children matched for non‐verbal IQ, grade, and gender.
Methods
The two groups were compared on different measures to understand the relationships between reading skills in their mother tongue and in English as a second‐language (L2). Subsequently, their phonological and memory skills were investigated to understand the potential role of these variables in learning L2 English.
Results
Students with RD obtained worse results than TD students for phonological awareness and working memory, which are both crucial to L2 learning.
Conclusions
The results suggest that memory mainly influences accuracy in English writing and, together with phonological skills, plays an important role in reading accuracy. Socio‐economic status also plays an important role in L2 learning.
Syllabification by hyphens (e.g., hy-phen-a-tion) is a standard procedure in early Finnish reading instruction. However, recent findings indicate that hyphenation slows down children's reading ...already during the first grade (Häikiö, Hyönä, & Bertram, 2015, 2016). In the present study, it was examined whether this slowdown is indicative of deeper processing and/or more strategic reading. To this end, 2nd grade children (N = 36) read short expository and narrative stories while their eye movements were registered. The presence of syllable boundary cue (SBC) was manipulated; for half of the stories, each word was hyphenated at syllable boundaries whereas the other half included no hyphenation. After each story, story comprehension (SC) was measured by three types of oral questions, namely free recall, cued recall, and true/false questions. With regard to reading behavior, SBC interacted with independently measured reading comprehension scores for both forward and regressive fixation times during first pass sentence reading. Hyphenation slowed down reading of good comprehenders to a larger extent than weaker comprehenders in comparison to nonhyphenated condition, especially for regressive fixation times. With respect to SC, cued recall scores were lower in the hyphenated than in the nonhyphenated condition. There was no effect of SBC in free recall or true/false questions. Hyphenation seems to promote phonological encoding even when readers might want to access words via orthographic codes, which are obscured by hyphenation, especially at the whole-word level. This more piecemeal reading style then makes it harder to integrate the pieces into a bigger whole, affecting not only reading speed but also reading comprehension.
Educational Impact and Implications Statement
Syllable structure is routinely marked with hyphens (e.g., syl-la-ble) in early Finnish reading instruction. The present study suggests that hyphens slow down 2nd grade children's reading and hinder their reading comprehension. These findings imply that the use of hyphenation in Finnish reading instruction needs to be reconsidered, especially as a one-style-fits-all approach.
Fostering children's engagement in regular recreational reading beyond independent skill acquisition is beneficial to promote continued literacy engagement. Regular recreational reading is associated ...with both literacy skill acquisition and maintenance across the life span. Children's perceptions of the importance and value of reading can influence their motivation to read. However, it is not currently known if children continue to perceive the value of reading beyond the period of independent reading skill acquisition. Findings from a sample of 997 older elementary children indicate that some children may not recognise the value of reading beyond independent reading skill acquisition. This is particularly significant, as children who valued the practice of reading read with greater frequency. In addition, children's subjective task valuing of reading was revealed through the scope of benefits they associated with engagement in the practice, which influenced their conceptualisation of its value. These findings have implications for future educational reading interventions, as fostering greater valuing of regular reading may enhance children's reading engagement, with valuing of reading found to be an important component of children's reading motivation. Author abstract
•Age-, reading-level-matched and developmental connectivity analyses in children.•Effective connectivity was assessed in children with and without dyslexia.•Connectivity was also assessed in ...development of children with and without dyslexia.•Feedforward connections from the visual word form area (VWFA) increased with age.•Connectivity from the inferior parietal lobule to the VWFA was altered in dyslexia.
Altered brain connectivity between regions of the reading network has been associated with reading difficulties. However, it remains unclear whether connectivity differences between children with dyslexia (DYS) and those with typical reading skills (TR) are specific to reading impairments or to reading experience. In this functional MRI study, 132 children (M = 10.06 y, SD = 1.46) performed a phonological lexical decision task. We aimed to disentangle (1) disorder-specific from (2) experience-related differences in effective connectivity and to (3) characterize the development of DYS and TR. We applied dynamic causal modeling to age-matched (ndys = 25, nTR = 35) and reading-level-matched (ndys = 25, nTR = 22) groups. Developmental effects were assessed in beginning and advanced readers (TR: nbeg = 48, nadv = 35, DYS: nbeg = 24, nadv = 25). We show that altered feedback connectivity between the inferior parietal lobule and the visual word form area (VWFA) during print processing can be specifically attributed to reading impairments, because these alterations were found in DYS compared to both the age-matched and reading-level-matched TR. In contrast, feedforward connectivity from the VWFA to parietal and frontal regions characterized experience in TR and increased with age and reading skill. These directed connectivity findings pinpoint disorder-specific and experience-dependent alterations in the brain's reading network.
We investigated the dimensionality of various indicators of reading prosody, and the relations of word reading and listening comprehension to the identified dimension(s) of reading prosody, using ...longitudinal data from Grades 1 to 3. A total of 371 English-speaking children were assessed on oral text reading, word reading, and listening comprehension in the fall and spring of each year (i.e., 6 waves of data). From oral text reading, reading prosody was evaluated on pause structures (pause duration, pause frequency) and pitch (intonation contour, F0 change) using spectrographic analysis, and on expressiveness, smoothness, phrasing, and pacing using the Multi-Dimensional Fluency Scale (MFS). A bifactor structure described the data best across the 6 waves, composed of (a) a ratings and pause general factor, which captured common variance among MFS, pause frequency, and pause duration; (b) ratings (MFS) and pause specific factors, which captured variance over and above the ratings and pause general factor; and (c) a separate pitch factor, which captured variance in intonation contour and F0 change. Word reading and listening comprehension were related to the identified dimensions of reading prosody, but when they were in a model together, word reading, not listening comprehension, was uniquely related to reading prosody across the six waves. These results indicate that reading prosody is multidimensional and that a pitch factor is a dissociable skill from the general ratings and pause prosody. Furthermore, word reading is the primary driver for the development of various dimensions of reading prosody, at least for children in primary grades.
Educational Impact and Implications Statement
Reading prosody, reading texts with appropriate expression, has been widely considered an important feature of text reading fluency. We found that multiple aspects and indicators of reading prosody are best described as a multidimensional construct composed of a pause and ratings dimension and a pitch dimension. Children's word reading and listening comprehension skills were both related to these dimensions of reading prosody, but word reading had a consistent and independent relation. These results indicate the importance of word reading development for expressive reading for children in primary grades.
The authors examine the growth and impact of guided reading, small group teaching for differentiated instruction in reading that was stimulated by their early publications. Many changes in literacy ...education have been observed as a result—almost as if educators had a “romance” with guided reading and leveled books. While changes have been positive, the “reality” is that there is much more work to be done to bring guided reading to its full potential for helping children become effective and joyful users of literacy. The authors call for a deeper understanding of the reading process and of the text characteristics of leveled books. They discuss misconceptions regarding fluency and describe the strategic use of assessment and the role of facilitative talk. Regarding guided reading instruction, we are at the end of the beginning and need to forge new understandings for the future.
Research into second language (L2) reading is an exponentially growing field. Yet, it still has a relatively short supply of comparable, ecologically valid data from readers representing a variety of ...first languages (L1). This article addresses this need by presenting a new data resource called MECO L2 (Multilingual Eye Movements Corpus), a rich behavioral eye-tracking record of text reading in English as an L2 among 543 university student speakers of 12 different L1s. MECO L2 includes a test battery of component skills of reading and allows for a comparison of the participants’ reading performance in their L1 and L2. This data resource enables innovative large-scale cross-sample analyses of predictors of L2 reading fluency and comprehension. We first introduce the design and structure of the MECO L2 resource, along with reliability estimates and basic descriptive analyses. Then, we illustrate the utility of MECO L2 by quantifying contributions of four sources to variability in L2 reading proficiency proposed in prior literature: reading fluency and comprehension in L1, proficiency in L2 component skills of reading, extralinguistic factors, and the L1 of the readers. Major findings included (a) a fundamental contrast between the determinants of L2 reading fluency versus comprehension accuracy, and (b) high within-participant consistency in the real-time strategy of reading in L1 and L2. We conclude by reviewing the implications of these findings to theories of L2 acquisition and outline further directions in which the new data resource may support L2 reading research.
Sixty-five Norwegian 10th graders used the software Read&Answer 2.0 (Vidal-Abarca et al.,
2011
) to read five different texts presenting conflicting views on the controversial scientific issue of sun ...exposure and health. Participants were administered a multiple-choice topic-knowledge measure before and after reading, a word recognition task, and a reading motivation inventory that included two dimensions: Science reading self-efficacy, focusing on readers’ beliefs about their capabilities to comprehend what they read in science, and science reading task value, focusing on readers’ beliefs about how important, useful, and interesting it is to comprehend science texts. In addition, strategic reading pattern was assessed in terms of the degree of non-linear reading behavior. Multiple regression analysis showed that word recognition skills strongly predicted learning from the texts, as assessed by participants’ increase in topic knowledge. However, when multiple-text comprehension indicated by performance on open-ended short-essay questions was the dependent variable, not only word recognition but also strategic reading pattern and science reading self-efficacy emerged as unique predictors when topic knowledge was controlled for. Science reading task value was not related to performance. This study provides new evidence that new literacy competencies needed in a knowledge society, such as synthesizing or integrating across multiple conflicting sources of information, still largely involve word-level, strategic, and motivational processes that may profitably be targeted through systematic instruction.
Previous meta-analyses on the relationship between phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and reading have been conducted primarily in English, an atypical alphabetic orthography. ...Here, we aimed to examine the association between phonological awareness, RAN, and word reading in a nonalphabetic language (Chinese). A random-effects model analysis of data from 35 studies revealed a moderate relationship of phonological awareness with reading accuracy (r = .36) and reading fluency (r = .39). RAN also correlated significantly with reading accuracy (r = -.38) and reading fluency (r = -.51), but its relationship varied as a function of test type (graphological RAN correlated more strongly with reading than nongraphological RAN) and reading outcome (RAN correlated more strongly with reading fluency than reading accuracy). Age/grade and dialect (Mandarin vs. Cantonese) did not influence the size of the correlations. Taken together, the findings of this meta-analysis suggest that phonological awareness and RAN are universal correlates of word reading.
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