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The Hybrid Text Comprehension cloze (HyTeC-cloze) (Kleijn et al. Lang Test 36:553–572, 2019) is a procedure developed for the Dutch language that has been proved to be a valid and reliable measure of text comprehension beyond the sentence level. Given its advantages, including its relatively rapid construction and scoring and performance compared to standardized tests, we adapted the HyTeC-cloze procedure to create a version for the Spanish language. Therefore, this study aims at validating our adaptation. We extracted 18 texts from different school textbooks (Science, Language and History) and grades (6th, 7th, and 8th) and turned them into cloze tests, which were administered to 316 sixth to eighth graders from Chilean primary schools through an online platform. We also used a Chilean standardized reading comprehension test to evaluate the validity of our test. The correlations ranged from a low of 0.20 (for 7th grade) to a high of 0.58 (for 8th grade). Taken collectively, our data show a moderate positive correlation between both tests, which provide further evidence of cloze tests as a valid measure of reading comprehension beyond the sentence level.

This study examined students’ ability to select relevant ideas from multiple online texts and integrate those ideas in their written products. Students (N = 162) used a web-based platform to complete an online inquiry task in which they read three texts presenting different perspectives on computer gaming and wrote an article for a school magazine on the issue based on these texts. Students selected two snippets from each text during reading and wrote their article with the selected snippets available. The selected snippets were scored according to their relevance for completing the task, and the written products were scored according to their integration quality. The results showed that most students performed well on the selection task. However, nearly half of the written products were characterized by poor integration quality. The hierarchical multiple regression analysis showed that students’ selection of relevant ideas from the texts contributed to their integration of information across texts over and above both reading fluency and reading comprehension skills. The study provides new evidence on the relationship between selection and integration when younger students work with multiple texts, and both theoretical and educational implications of these findings are discussed.

Good readers use various comprehension strategies to understand texts. However, many students lack knowledge on how to purposefully and effectively use text comprehension strategies. In this experimental study, the effectiveness of teaching text comprehension strategies on vocabulary and text comprehension at literal, inferential and evaluative levels was evaluated among 257 sixth-grade students from 10 Estonian schools. Accordingly, skim reading, vocabulary building, monitoring, generating and answering questions, and identifying the main idea and summarising were taught by Estonian language teachers during a 3-month intervention period. Group-level analysis indicated that students in the experimental condition improved their vocabulary and text comprehension at all levels, whereas students from the control condition improved only their literal text comprehension. Individual-level analysis revealed that students in different profile groups of the experimental condition benefited from the intervention. However, in the control condition, only those students with average vocabulary and text comprehension increased their literal comprehension. As various strategies can improve students’ text comprehension at different levels, they should be included in the curriculum and reading lessons.

This study examined the contribution of self-reported metacognitive regulation of reading to expository digital text comprehension in an e-learning environment, completed at home, instead of a class or lab. Two hundred and nineteen college students read and answered questions about two low previous knowledge hypertexts, and reported metacognitive activities during the comprehension tasks with a metacognitive inventory referred to the tasks just completed. They also completed a questionnaire about their Internet frequency use and experience. Verbal ability and working memory tests were administered in a lab session. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses defined two factors underlying the metacognitive scale, Global/Monitoring, including having in mind the task purpose, re-reading and paying attention to important or difficult parts, and Problem Solving in disorientation or lack of understanding, and the use of typography and navigation elements as comprehension aids. Metacognitive activity scores were neither associated with verbal ability nor Internet experience. Students with more verbal ability, more Global/Monitor metacognitive skills, and more Internet experience were more likely to correctly answer comprehension questions. Results are in line with previous studies in controlled settings and show the relevance of self-regulation for e-learning comprehension.

This study explored the dimensionality of multiple-text comprehension strategies in a sample of 216 Norwegian education undergraduates who read seven separate texts on a science topic and immediately afterwards responded to a self-report inventory focusing on strategic multiple-text processing in that specific task context. Two dimensions were identified through factor analysis: one concerning the accumulation of pieces of information from the different texts and one concerning cross-text elaboration. In a subsample of 71 students who were also administered measures of intratextual and intertextual comprehension after responding to the strategy inventory, hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that self-reported accumulation of information and cross-text elaboration explained variance in intertextual comprehension even after variance associated with prior knowledge had been removed.

This teaching tip outlines a comprehension strategy designed to support early primary students in reading to learn while learning to read. The strategy is born of the authors’ classroom practices and is designed to support young children in reading and understanding informational texts by facilitating close interactions between text and reader. Through its steps—Read, Stop, Think, Ask, Connect—the strategy supports beginning readers in recognizing and responding to the challenges that informational texts hold for reading and comprehending. The Read, Stop, Think, Ask, Connect strategy is designed to be used flexibly to account for the diversity of readers and of texts in early primary classrooms and encourages educators to consider students’ prior learning, text selection, and multimodal supports when connecting beginning readers with informational texts.

There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read and how they can best be taught. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questions but, somewhat surprisingly, this research has been slow to make inroads into educational policy and practice. Instead, the field has been plagued by decades of 'reading wars.' Even now, there remains a wide gap between the state of research knowledge about learning to read and the state of public understanding. The aim of this article is to fill this gap. We present a comprehensive tutorial review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children's earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. We explain why phonics instruction is so central to learning in a writing system such as English. But we also move beyond phonics, reviewing research on what else children need to learn to become expert readers and considering how this might be translated into effective classroom practice. We call for an end to the reading wars and recommend an agenda for instruction and research in reading acquisition that is balanced, developmentally informed, and based on a deep understanding of how language and writing systems work. [Author abstract]

Educators are aware of the need to promote students’ academic language to support text comprehension. Yet, besides teaching academic vocabulary, many educators continue to ask, What would this instruction entail? Guided by a new framework known as core academic language skills (CALS), the authors’ research focuses on delineating core language skills that contribute to reading comprehension to make them more visible to educators and researchers. In this article, findings from two studies are integrated to argue for a mixed‐methods approach to advance academic language research and pedagogy. In study 1, the authors assessed upper elementary/middle school students’ CALS and quantitatively examined the association between CALS and reading comprehension. In study 2, the authors used qualitative methods to collect and analyze students’ oral reflections about academic language. Key findings from these studies and their implications for academic language pedagogy in today's schools are discussed.

When reading conflicting science-related texts, readers may attend to cues which allow them to assess plausibility. One such plausibility cue is the use of graphs in the texts, which are regarded as typical of 'hard science'. The goal of our study was to investigate the effects of the presence of graphs on the perceived plausibility and situation model strength for conflicting science-related texts, while including the influence of readers' amount of experience with scientific texts and graphs as a potential moderator of these effects. In an experiment mimicking web-based informal learning, 77 university students read texts on controversial scientific issues which were presented with either graphs or tables. Perceived plausibility and situation model strength for each text were assessed immediately after reading; reader variables were assessed several weeks prior to the experiment proper. The results suggest that graphs can indeed serve as plausibility cues and thus boost situation model strength for texts which contain them. This effect was mediated by the perceived plausibility of the information in the texts with graphs. However, whether readers use graphs as plausibility cues in texts with conflicting information seems to depend also on their amount of experience with scientific texts and graphs.

This study is a comprehensive attempt to assess the impact of the cognitive skill of perception in the ability to comprehend a text. More specifically, it investigates the function of perception as a primary structure of the human brain to contact the world and examines the certain cognitive processes of perception that affect text comprehension. It is also presented the relation between cognitive perception and the linguistic approach of pragmatics in order the subject to comprehend the text. Perception is the organization, identification and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment. Pragmatics is the linguistic field that studies how people comprehend and produce speech or a text as a communicative act. Furthermore, it features the current scientific achievements on the ICTs processes and tools, which exploit the assessment of perception in text comprehension.