Dual Language and ENL Comprehension: A First Grade Study for Students at Risk for Delayed English Language Development

This research began by asking how dual language programming impacts English comprehension for ENL students. Research was conducted within one first grade dual language cohort with five bilingual students. The data was collected by interviewing teachers and students, utilizing historical comprehension data, observing read alouds, and assessing student comprehension. Findings revealed that comprehension in a participant’s first language was positively related to English comprehension. However, individual student differences impacted the extent of the correlation. Furthermore, dual language teachers implemented common instructional practices to scaffold ENL student comprehension. Therefore, the data implied that native language instruction is integral, student backgrounds and differences need to be analyzed, and dual language educators need adequate professional development to best aid ENL comprehension

Quotient-Comprehension Chains

Quotients and comprehension are fundamental mathematical constructions that can be described via adjunctions in categorical logic. This paper reveals that quotients and comprehension are related to measurement, not only in quantum logic, but also in probabilistic and classical logic. This relation is presented by a long series of examples, some of them easy, and some also highly non-trivial (esp. for von Neumann algebras). We have not yet identified a unifying theory. Nevertheless, the paper contributes towards such a theory by introducing the new quotient-and-comprehension perspective on measurement instruments, and by describing the examples on which such a theory should be built.Comment: In Proceedings QPL 2015, arXiv:1511.0118

Novel metaphors comprehension in a child with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders. A study on assessment and treatment

Until the first decade of the current millennium, the literature on metaphor comprehension highlighted typical difficulties in children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). More recently, some scholars have devised special programs for enhancing the capability of understanding metaphors in these children. This article presents a case study based on a treatment aiming at enhancing novel metaphor comprehension in a high-functioning child with ASD. M.M., a pseudoacronym for an 8;10 year-old boy, diagnosed with high-functioning ASD, was first assessed with a metaphor comprehension test. This testing (at time TO) highlighted a rigid refusal of metaphors and a marked tendency toward literal interpretation. A baseline treatment (8 sessions of 45-60 min each, twice a week) was implemented, based on a series of recognition, denomination and emotion comprehension activities. M. M.'s metaphor comprehension was assessed a second time (Ti), followed by the experimental treatment (same duration and frequency as the first one), specifically focused on metaphor comprehension. Finally, a third assessment of metaphor comprehension took place (T2), followed by a last assessment 4 months later (follow-up, T3). The comparison between the performances at the metaphor comprehension test across the four assessments, from TO to T3, showed that the baseline treatment produced no effect at all, whereas a significant improvement appeared at T2, just after the experimental treatment, later confirmed at the follow up. Both quantitative and qualitative results showed an evident improvement in the way M.M. handled the semantic issues posed by the metaphors of the test, in line with the strategies he was taught during the treatmen

Poor written and oral text comprehension in third grade children. A multiple case study

In this multiple case study we analyzed oral text comprehension, reading profiles and underlying cognitive abilities (attention, executive functions, working memory, narrative memory, rapid automatized naming and vocabulary) of 9 children identified as poor written text comprehenders after a school screening on 75 third grade children. Four out of the 9 children were named Language-Minority (L-M) children, since they had immigrant parents. The remaining 5 children were born in Italy from Italian parents. The comparisons of the two subgroups suggested that the lexical route of reading was particularly impaired in the L-M subgroup and that written text comprehension was weakened by restricted vocabulary which, in turn, was not supported by efficient phonological short-term memory. In a second type of data analysis we examined the individual profiles of the 9 children, irrespective of their belonging to the L-M or Italian subgroups, and identified different patterns of associations among reading performance, written text comprehension and oral text comprehension. The findings showed that poor text comprehension always co-occurred with word and/or text reading difficulties which, in turn, were associated to slow naming and weak verbal working memory. Moreover, when children had both written and oral text comprehension difficulties, not only verbal working memory was impaired but also narrative memory, suggesting a weakness in the episodic buffer (Baddeley 2000; 2010). The implications of poor working memory associated to slow naming and/or weak episodic buffer for text comprehension are discusse

Teaching Reading Comprehension Using Jigsaw System

Penelitian tentang pengajaran ?óÔé¼?£reading comprehension using jigsaw system?óÔé¼Ôäó ini bertujuanuntuk menunjukan keuntungan dari penggunaan ?óÔé¼?£jigsaw system?óÔé¼Ôäó dalam pengajaran ?óÔé¼?£readingcomprehension?óÔé¼Ôäó. Data penelitian diambil dari siswa kelas XI IPS 1 SMAN 1 Randudongkal.Hasil penelitian ini menunjukan bahwa ada peningkatan kemampuan ?óÔé¼?£rading comprehension?óÔé¼Ôäósiswa kelas XI IPS1 SMAN 1 Randudongkal setelah diajar dengan ?óÔé¼?£jigsaw system?óÔé¼Ôäó

Purported use and self-awareness of cognitive and metacognitive foreign language reading strategies in tertiary education in Mozambique

This paper explores the results of a Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS)-based questionnaire administered to 28 university student participants. The study is carried out in a post-colonial multilingual context, Mozambique. The main aims of the paper are to assess the degree of purported use and awareness of participants own use of reading comprehension skills and strategies in a foreign language (English). The participants were tested for their reading text comprehension using an IELTS comprehension test (Cabinda, 2013). The results revealed low reading comprehension levels. Results contrast with results from the SORS-based questionnaire (Cabinda, 2013) which revealed claims of use of a wide range of cognitive, metacognitive and supply strategies – aspects of high level reading ability and text comprehension. Conclusions show that the participants used or claimed to chiefly use metacognitive and cognitive reading strategies equally, matching the behaviour of good readers, but they also reported a high degree of supply strategies to construe meaning from text, mainly code-switching, translation and cognates. The latter confirms results from studies by Jimenez et al. (1995, 1996) and Zhang & Wu (2009), yet do not conclusively show a correlation between the participants’ degree of text comprehension and their effective use of reading skills and strategies to construe meaning. Further conclusions show that the reported high use of these L1 (Portuguese or other) related supply strategies (not used by English L1 readers) does not aid their reading comprehension

Skim reading: an adaptive strategy for reading on the web

It has been suggested that readers spend a great deal of time skim reading on the Web and that if readers skim read they reduce their comprehension of what they have read. There have been a number of studies exploring skim reading, but relatively little exists on the skim reading of hypertext and Webpages. In the experiment documented here, we utilised eye tracking methodology to explore how readers skim read hypertext and how hyperlinks affect reading behaviour. The results show that the readers read faster when they were skim reading and comprehension was reduced. However, the presence of hyperlinks seemed to assist the readers in picking out important information when skim reading. We suggest that readers engage in an adaptive information foraging strategy where they attempt to minimise comprehension loss while maintaining a high reading speed. Readers use hyperlinks as markers to suggest important information and use them to read through the text in an efficient and effective way. This suggests that skim reading may not be as damaging to comprehension when reading hypertext, but it does mean that the words we choose to hyperlink become very important to comprehension for those skim reading text on the Web

STARC: Structured Annotations for Reading Comprehension

We present STARC (Structured Annotations for Reading Comprehension), a new annotation framework for assessing reading comprehension with multiple choice questions. Our framework introduces a principled structure for the answer choices and ties them to textual span annotations. The framework is implemented in OneStopQA, a new high-quality dataset for evaluation and analysis of reading comprehension in English. We use this dataset to demonstrate that STARC can be leveraged for a key new application for the development of SAT-like reading comprehension materials: automatic annotation quality probing via span ablation experiments. We further show that it enables in-depth analyses and comparisons between machine and human reading comprehension behavior, including error distributions and guessing ability. Our experiments also reveal that the standard multiple choice dataset in NLP, RACE, is limited in its ability to measure reading comprehension. 47% of its questions can be guessed by machines without accessing the passage, and 18% are unanimously judged by humans as not having a unique correct answer. OneStopQA provides an alternative test set for reading comprehension which alleviates these shortcomings and has a substantially higher human ceiling performance.Comment: ACL 2020. OneStopQA dataset, STARC guidelines and human experiments data are available at https://github.com/berzak/onestop-q

Teachers' use of questioning and modelling comprehension skills in primary classrooms

Research suggests that children's understanding of text can be improved by the explicit teaching of those comprehension strategies that are used implicitly by skilled readers, particularly the use of self-regulating strategies to generate questions about text. This study of the teaching of comprehension in 51 London Key Stage 2 classrooms explores the extent to which comprehension strategies are explicitly taught within the literacy hour and the amount of opportunity which is provided for children to generate there own questions. Evidence from teacher interviews and classroom observations shows that direct teacher questioning, mostly in the form of 'teacher-led recitation', is both the most frequently advocated, and the dominant strategy used for teaching comprehension. When sharing books with children, teachers model the strategies which are used by skilled comprehenders, but they neither make these strategies explicit nor encourage children to generate their own questions about the text