The Effect of Instructional Reading Software on Developing English Reading Speed and Comprehension for IT University Students


Book Description

Sumar Ghizan has been a faculty member in the English Language Institute (ELI) at New York Institute of Technology from 2005 until Sep 2010. Recently, she is a research Assistant at The University of Windsor where she is enrolled in the MEd program. She has been teaching English Language for Graduate and Undergraduate Students for more than twelve years. In 2010 Ghizan has obtained her degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Curricula and Methods of English Language from the College of Educational and Psychological Sciences, AAU. Her research interests are in language acquisition, educational policies and curricula studies. She had participated in one conference and looking forward to attend another in Brussels where she is going to present a paper on Educational Policies for the First Nation Child: impediments and future perceptions.




Executive Function and Education


Book Description

Executive function is an umbrella term for various cognitive processes that are central to goal-directed behavior, thoughts, and emotions. These processes are especially important in novel or demanding situations, which require a rapid and flexible adjustment of behavior to the changing demands of the environment. The development of executive function relies on the maturation of associated brain regions as well as on stimulation in the child’s social contexts, especially the home and school. Over the past decade, the term executive function has become a buzzword in the field of education as both researchers and educators underscore the importance of skills like goal setting, planning, and organizing in academic success. Accordingly, in initiating this Research Topic and eBook our goal was to provide a forum for state-of-the-art theoretical and empirical work on this that both facilitates communication among researchers from diverse fields and provides a theoretically sound source of information for educators. The contributors to this volume, who hail from several different countries in Europe and North America, have certainly accomplished this goal in their nuanced and cutting-edge depictions of the complex links among various executive function components and educational success.




Fluency and Reading Comprehension in Typical Readers and Dyslexic Readers: Volume II


Book Description

This Research Topic is the second edition of Fluency and reading comprehension in typical readers and dyslexics readers: Volume I This Second Edition Research Topic is focused on the characterization of the reading-writing difficulties and their comorbidities and in the analysis of evidence-based recommendations for early interventions and treatment of these difficulties within the fields of neuropsychology, speech-language pathology, and educational psychology. Reading involves decoding and comprehension components, and to become efficient it requires a large number of cognitive and linguistic processes. Among those, decoding failures can have different origins, such as deficits in phonological and/or visual processing. In addition, a child with reading difficulties might also have problems in the acquisition of writing and handwriting performance. This is an important point to be discussed, as reading and writing both suffer interference from vocabulary acquisition, linguistic skills, memory skills, reading and writing practices, and literacy methods. These processes become important only when the professional needs to deal with students presenting learning difficulties. Difficulty in using the knowledge of conversion rules between grapheme-phoneme to word reading construction or phoneme-grapheme for writing can be identified in schoolchildren with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dysortography, being a specific learning disorder with a neurological etiology. In addition, there is established evidence of a speech-language processing basis, students with specific learning disabilities can show a range of cognitive difficulties (e.g., rapid naming, executive functioning, working memory). These presented difficulties interfere in their learning process, impairing their learning development.




Training Readers and Writers for a Multimodal and Multimedia Society: Cognitive Aspects


Book Description

Contemporary societies have been advancing gradually towards the construction of a model of a literate population. Significant efforts have been made so that most citizens can access various sources today, using their reading and writing abilities, but are we really prepared to face the information age? Is information literacy being promoted from schools? Are individual capabilities being considered? Do we have a true critical literacy? This article collection aims to show an overview of the most recent research; ranging from the individual to the collective, from the subject's competencies and their beliefs, to the way to develop them from school. There is room in this Research Topic for investigations belonging to the linguistic, psychological, and didactic field. This Research Topic aims to address a pressing problem in contemporary world societies. It is proposed to offer various contributions related to critical literacy, in general, and reading and writing. In this sense, research that addresses analog and digital reading, writing processes, academic literacy, and the use of resources such as non-fiction illustrated books to develop critical thinking, will be welcome. But also, and in a very important way, the cognitive processes of the subject will be considered, not only to deal with access to information, but also in the construction of their mental lexicon, an issue that offers the vision of the world of those who are immersed in literacy and in the post-truth era.




Reading Fluency


Book Description

Reading fluency has been identified as a key component of proficient reading. Research has consistently demonstrated significant and substantial correlations between reading fluency and overall reading achievement. Despite the great potential for fluency to have a significant outcome on students’ reading achievement, it continues to be not well understood by teachers, school administrators and policy makers. The chapters in this volume examine reading fluency from a variety of perspectives. The initial chapter sketches the history of fluency as a literacy instruction component. Following chapters examine recent studies and approaches to reading fluency, followed by chapters that explore actual fluency instruction models and the impact of fluency instruction. Assessment of reading fluency is critical for monitoring progress and identifying students in need of intervention. Two articles on assessment, one focused on word recognition and the other on prosody, expand our understanding of fluency measurement. Finally, a study from Turkey explores the relationship of various reading competencies, including fluency, in an integrated model of reading. Our hope for this volume is that it may spark a renewed interest in research into reading fluency and fluency instruction and move toward making fluency instruction an even more integral part of all literacy instruction.




Fluency and Reading Comprehension in Typical Readers and Dyslexics Readers


Book Description

Reading involves decoding and comprehension components and, to become efficient, it requires a large number of cognitive and linguistic processes. Among those, the phonological awareness, the alphabetic principle, the decoding, the fluency, the lexical development and the text comprehension development. The reading comprehension is strongly related with the development of vocabulary, oral language, linguistic skills, memory skills and ability to make inferences, and the world experiences of each individual. These processes become important only when the professional needs to deal with students presenting difficulties in learning how to read. The difficulty using the knowledge of conversion rules between grapheme and phoneme to the word reading construction characterizes the dyslexia, which is a specific learning disorder with a neurological source. These difficulties presented by students with dyslexia interfere in their learning process impairing the learning development. Knowing and following the reading development and its processes, as well as obtaining the punctuation of fluency abilities and students comprehension allow us to understand what happens when the student presents difficulties to read. This could help in the identification of learning disabilities and in the development of intervention programs.




Children's Problems in Text Comprehension


Book Description

A 1991 examination of children's comprehension abilities by Yuill and Oakhill.




The Chinese Language


Book Description

"DeFrancis's book is first rate. It entertains. It teaches. It demystifies. It counteracts popular ignorance as well as sophisticated (cocktail party) ignorance. Who could ask for anything more? There is no other book like it. ... It is one of a kind, a first, and I would not only buy it but I would recommend it to friends and colleagues, many of whom are visiting China now and are adding 'two-week-expert' ignorance to the two kinds that existed before. This is a book for everyone." --Joshua A. Fishman, research professor of social sciences, Yeshiva University, New York "Professor De Francis has produced a work of great effectiveness that should appeal to a wide-ranging audience. It is at once instructive and entertaining. While being delighted by the flair of his novel approach, the reader will also be led to ponder on some of the most fundamental problems concerning the relations between written languages and spoken languages. Specifically, he will be served a variety of information on the languages of East Asia, not as dry pedantic facts, but as appealing tidbits that whet the intellectual appetite. The expert will find much to reflect on in this book, for Professor DeFrancis takes nothing for granted." --William S.Y. Wang, professor of linguistics, University of California at Berkeley




International Review of Research in Developmental Disabilities


Book Description

International Review of Research in Developmental Disabilities, Volume 57 in the series, highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters written by an international board of authors who discuss Peer mentoring and the development of friendships between individuals with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities, Health issues across adulthood in Down Syndrome: a view from multiple databases, Mindfulness interventions in developmental disabilities: issues and possibilities, Reading Interventions for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities: a review, Communication system identification for individuals with complex communication needs, and much more. - Provides the authority and expertise of leading contributors from an international board of authors - Presents the latest release in the International Review of Research in Developmental Disabilities series




Child and Adolescent Development in Latin America


Book Description

Explore the multiple dimensions of child and adolescent development in Latin America, and get acquainted with the research from this region and how it relates to the international scientific literature. This special issue presents a collection of reviews developed by leading scholars in Latin America about the state of child and adolescent research in this region. Topics considered include: poverty and cognitive development, school readiness of preschool children, peer relations and socioemotional development, psychopathology and psychiatric diagnosis, reading comprehension and related interventions, and the development of creativity. This is the 152nd volume in this Jossey-Bass series New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. Its mission is to provide scientific and scholarly presentations on cutting edge issues and concepts in this subject area. Each volume focuses on a specific new direction or research topic and is edited by experts from that field.