The Relationships Between Korean University Students’ Reading Attitude,Reading Strategy Use,and Reading Proficiency

This present study investigated the relationships among L2 readers’ reading attitude, reading strategy use, and reading proficiency in order to identify patterns caused by individuals’ differences. For this study, 153 Korean university students replied to a reading attitude and reading strategy questionnaire. An ANOVA and frequency analysis were employed to analyze the data. The results showed that of the six components used to measure reading attitude in this study, only discomfort was found to be related to reading proficiency. With regards to reading strategy use, metacognitive strategy use was identified as having a significant relationship with reading proficiency, suggesting its important role in reading skill. Interestingly, discomfort and linguistic value were more closely associated with their cognitive strategy use, while comfort and intellectual value were strongly related to metacognitive strategy use. The pedagogical implications based on the findings from this study are offered to assist students in developing their L2 reading skills.     

Reading Anxiety: An Early Affective Impediment to Children’s Success in Reading

Learning to read is a critical but often challenging academic task for young children. In the current study, we explore the relation between children’s reading affect-–particularly anxiety-–and reading achievement in the early years of reading acquisition. We hypothesized that reading anxiety would relate to reading achievement across the school year and that boys and girls might show differential patterns in the relation between reading anxiety and achievement due to the common stereotype that boys underperform in reading. A sample of first and second grade students completed measures of reading anxiety, positive reading affect, math achievement, and reading achievement in the fall and spring. Results show that reading anxiety and reading achievement share a bi-directional relation in which fall reading anxiety predicts spring reading achievement and vice versa. Furthermore, the pattern of relation between reading anxiety and achievement differs by gender: boys appear more susceptible to the reciprocal damaging effects of reading anxiety on reading achievement across the school year. Finally, reading achievement shares a stronger relation with reading anxiety than with positive reading affect, perhaps because of the phenomenon in which negative relative to positive experiences have a greater psychological impact.     

Motivation for Reading and Upper Primary School Students’ Academic Achievement in Reading in Kenya

This study examined primary school students' reading motivation and performance on the standardized exam. Participants included 901 seventh and eighth grade students from Kenya. There were 468 females and 433 males. Contrary to previous studies, results showed reading challenge and aesthetics, but not efficacy, predicted reading achievement, indicating reading motivation may not influence achievement similarly across cultures. Gender differences were found in reading achievement but not motivation, an indication of a complex relationship between reading motivation and achievement. Students who read mostly for compliance and recognition did poorly in reading. Eighth graders did better in both reading motivation and achievement.     

Against ‘Against Slagle's Reading’

Serdal Tümkaya has argued that my critique of eliminative materialism makes several missteps. He argues that eliminativism should be taken as a methodology not a settled conclusion, and the final product may well retain some folk psychology concepts. I respond that methodological eliminativism does avoid self-defeat but does not pose a problem for the folk psychologist. Plus, insofar as eliminativism is not eliminating the propositional attitudes but accomodating or translating them, it is not distinct from other, less extreme forms of materialism.     

The Relationship Between Students’ Reading Orientations and their Strategic Activity During a Collaborative Reading Task

This study examined the connection between middle school students’ beliefs about reading and their use of comprehension strategies during a collaborative reading activity. Seventy-one fifth- and sixth-grade students were videotaped while they worked in small groups to read and discuss short texts describing the reading habits and abilities of four fictitious readers. Students’ conceptions of successful reading were determined based on their rankings of these fictitious readers, and their strategic activity was indexed by coding their use of strategies and the participation roles they assumed while working together. The analyses revealed a strong relationship between students’ conceptions of reading and their patterns of interaction during the collaborative activity. The findings enrich our understanding of this relationship and raise important questions for future investigations.     

Reading paradigms: From lab to cyberspace?

Computer-controlled display procedures useful for doing reading research are discussed. The procedures used in the present research vary the text unit size (from single words to half-sentences), the amount of context available (no context and varying amounts of prior text), text movement (centered words or successive left-to-right placement), and use of text highlighting (present, absent). The data suggest links between the display attributes and the subjects’ coding strategies during reading of mathematical word problems. Display attributes can influence the time course of processing, the subjectively coded unit size, and the nature of linguistic processing. The data also have implications for display attributes that may make reading in cyberspace more user friendly for both novice and expert readers.     

Is Reading Recovery an Effective Intervention for Students with Reading Difficulties? A Critique of the i3 Scale-Up Study

The recently reported i3 Scale-Up of Reading Recovery (May et al., 2015) found an effect size of + 0.69 in favor of Reading Recovery compared to the control group. We discuss four issues: (a) many of the lowest achieving students were excluded from participation in Reading Recovery; (b) the control group received a range of different experiences; (c) the successful completion rate of students in the program was modest; and (d) no data supported the claim that Reading Recovery leads to sustained literacy learning gains. We question the value of this study as the basis for widespread implementation of Reading Recovery.     

Relationships between Turkish Eighth-Grade Students’ Oral Reading Efficacy,Reading Comprehension and Achievement Scores on a High-Stakes Achievement Test

The present study aimed to explore the relation between students’ oral reading efficacy, reading comprehension, and academic performance on a nationwide high school placement exam (TEOG). The students were selected from a public middle school. The students’ oral reading efficacy, comprehension, and TEOG achievement scores were obtained to figure out the relations between them. The students’ TEOG results were obtained from the school administration. The findings revealed that there were statistically significant relations between oral reading efficacy, reading comprehension and TEOG achievements. Particularly, students’ reading comprehension and accuracy skills together explained 57% of variance in overall TEOG achievements.     

Why Reading? Because it's there

Three papers (V. A. Mann, Reading skill and language skill. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 1–15; G. Wolford & C. A. Fowler, Differential use of partial information by good and poor readers. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 16–35; F. J. Morrison, Reading disability: A problem in rule learning and word decoding. Developmental Review, 1984, 4, 36–47) are critiqued from the standpoint of their adequacy in advancing our understanding of a problem as complex as reading disability. Experimenters should be explicit about their guiding theoretical assumptions, and should think through the relations, if any, between their laboratory tasks and the actual processes of reading. The reading protocol of a dyslexic child is provided, and is interpreted within the frameworks of the Mann, Wolford and Fowler, and Morrison viewpoints.     

The Simulated Self – Fiction Reading and Narrative Identity

Philosophia - How do participating in a work of fiction and imagining a fictional world intertwine with the reader’s life? I develop an account that explores the relation between fiction...     

Investigating Iranian Medical Students’ Second Language Reading Motivation

Concentrating on second language reading motivation as an important construct with different constituents, this study sought to investigate the factors that majorly motivated medical students to read in English, and to find the orientation of the students in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The data were collected from a sample of 131 students in Fasa University of Medical Sciences, Iran, using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. On the basis of the data collected, the researchers found that among the eight constructs of L2 reading motivation proposed by Komiyama, the lowest mean value was found in the construct “social sharing”, whereas the highest mean value was found in the construct “grades”. Moreover, it was observed that the medical students were both extrinsically and intrinsically motivated.     

Reliability of Ratings of Children’s Expressive Reading

This study examined ratings of fourth graders’ oral reading expression. Randomly assigned participants (n = 36) practiced repeated readings using narrative or informational passages for 7 weeks. After this period raters used the Multidimensional Fluency Scale (MFS) on two separate occasions to rate students’ expressive reading of four equivalent passages. Results of this generalizability study showed that a minimum of two and preferably three equivalent passages, two raters, and one rating occasion are recommended to obtain reliable ratings. This research substantiates the reliability of the MFS and demonstrates the importance of raters collaborating and finding texts at students’ independent reading levels.     

Teachers’ Use of Technology in Elementary Reading Lessons

Proponents claim technology will transform classroom teaching and improve children's engagement and learning. Opponents argue that such benefits are oversold because little evidence exists that technology improves teaching and learning. We examined how elementary teachers in an urban school that was well resourced with technology used it when teaching reading. After 25 hours of observation we found teachers used technology to display multimedia content, generate interactive learning activities, focus student attention, display texts for shared reading, and individualize children's learning activities. Primary-grade reading lessons were often more participatory and multimodal than those in the intermediate grades.     

Promoting Generalization of Reading: A Comparison of Two Fluency-Based Interventions for Improving General Education Student’s Oral Reading Rate

The generalization effects of empirically-supported fluency-based reading interventions have been largely ignored. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of two fluency-based reading interventions, Repeated Readings and Multiple Exemplars, on elementary-aged children’s immediate and generalized oral reading fluency rate. Using a within-subjects group design, a total of 42 second (n = 25) and fourth (n = 17) grade general education students were administered both interventions and their generalized responding to passages containing high word and medium word overlap was assessed. Results indicated that children’s oral fluency on intervention passages was significantly greater during the Repeated Readings intervention. However, children’s oral reading fluency on generalization passages containing medium word overlap was significantly greater following the Multiple Exemplars intervention. This difference was however possibly due to the Multiple Exemplar medium word overlap passage being easier for students to read. No significant differences between the two interventions were observed in children’s oral reading fluency on generalization passages containing high word overlap. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed in relation to improving students’ reading fluency on generalization passages.     

When Are Tutorial Dialogues More Effective Than Reading?

It is often assumed that engaging in a one-on-one dialogue with a tutor is more effective than listening to a lecture or reading a text. Although earlier experiments have not always supported this hypothesis, this may be due in part to allowing the tutors to cover different content than the noninteractive instruction. In 7 experiments, we tested the interaction hypothesis under the constraint that (a) all students covered the same content during instruction, (b) the task domain was qualitative physics, (c) the instruction was in natural language as opposed to mathematical or other formal languages, and (d) the instruction conformed with a widely observed pattern in human tutoring: Graesser, Person, and Magliano's 5-step frame. In the experiments, we compared 2 kinds of human tutoring (spoken and computer mediated) with 2 kinds of natural-language-based computer tutoring (Why2-Atlas and Why2-AutoTutor) and 3 control conditions that involved studying texts. The results depended on whether the students' preparation matched the content of the instruction. When novices (students who had not taken college physics) studied content that was written for intermediates (students who had taken college physics), then tutorial dialogue was reliably more beneficial than less interactive instruction, with large effect sizes. When novices studied material written for novices or intermediates studied material written for intermediates, then tutorial dialogue was not reliably more effective than the text-based control conditions.     

Reading recovery© won't fix poor core tier-one reading instruction

This essay challenges whether or not the use of district money for Reading Recovery^© (RR) instruction is an effective expenditure of funds that results in sustained improvement in student reading outcomes. As a Tier 3 intervention, RR provides expensive, one-on-one tutoring for first- and second-grade readers that is occupying an increasingly larger instructional space across districts. While some studies have shown improvement due to RR, others show these results eventually dissolve. A disturbing trend is advocacy by some RR teachers that RR methods be incorporated into Tier 1 instruction. In this essay we further explore the issues surrounding RR.     

Against Slagle’s Reading of Eliminative Materialism on Self-Defeating

Jim Slagle claims that eliminative materialism (EM) denies some of the mind’s self-evident properties, such as intentionality, qualia and the view that beliefs are real or veridical. I, herein, will argue that what EM denies is actually the folk psychological notion of belief, not belief as such. The Churchlands construe propositional belief as merely one kind of representation in the larger representational scheme. The point here is not to deny belief, but to construe it as one of the, and possibly a very recent, sorts of representations that the brain uses, not the general or fundamental form thereof.     

Reading ‘is’ Existentially in Republic 476–80

An existential reading of ‘is’ in the argument at Republic 476–480 is widely thought to be objectionable because it commits Plato to belief in degrees of existence. In this paper, I argue that neither proposed alternative—the veridical reading or the predicative reading—can be reconciled with the text, thus forcing the existential reading upon us. Further, I show that when Plato's doctrine of existence is properly understood, his commitment to degrees of existence is not at all absurd.     

Mental Juggling: When Does Multitasking Impair Reading Comprehension?

The present study investigated the conditions under which multitasking impairs reading comprehension. Participants read prose passages (the primary task), some of which required them to perform a secondary task. In Experiment 1, we compared two different types of secondary tasks (answering trivia questions and solving math problems). Reading comprehension was assessed using a multiple-choice test that measured both factual and conceptual knowledge. The results showed no observable detrimental effects associated with multitasking. In Experiment 2, the secondary task was a cognitive load task that required participants to remember a string of numbers while reading the passages. Performance on the reading comprehension test was lower in the cognitive load conditions relative to the no-load condition. The present study delineates the conditions under which multitasking can impair or have no effect on reading comprehension. These results further our understanding of our capacity to multitask and have practical implications in our technologically advanced society in which multitasking has become commonplace.