Adolescent Literacy and Textbooks: An Annotated Bibliography

A companion report to Carnegie's Time to Act, provides an annotated bibliography of research on textbook design and reading comprehension for fourth through twelfth grade, arranged by topic. Calls for a dialogue between publishers and researchers

Authoring with Retudisauth adaptive dialogues for text comprehension

AbstractIn this work is presented the process of authoring adaptive dialogues for informatics text comprehension using the authoring tool of ReTuDiS (Reflective Tutorial Dialogue System), which is based on text comprehension theories. Previous study resulted in student's profiles depending on their prior knowledge and students were given the appropriate text with text activities according to their profiles. Students organized text representations with different structure: relational, transformational and teleological. The purpose of this study is to design and test educational material of personalized dialogue activities for text comprehension appropriate for each student, depending on student's text representation. Dialogues are tested by groups of participating students before the authoring tool is used to incorporate the material in ReTuDiS. Feedback provided by the system, in the form of personalized dialogues, promotes reflection and is expected to help students improve their text comprehension skills. The system is accessible throughout the web and can be tested in real classroom conditions

Act-Aware Slot-Value Predicting in Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking

As an essential component in task-oriented dialogue systems, dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to track human-machine interactions and generate state representations for managing the dialogue. Representations of dialogue states are dependent on the domain ontology and the user's goals. In several task-oriented dialogues with a limited scope of objectives, dialogue states can be represented as a set of slot-value pairs. As the capabilities of dialogue systems expand to support increasing naturalness in communication, incorporating dialogue act processing into dialogue model design becomes essential. The lack of such consideration limits the scalability of dialogue state tracking models for dialogues having specific objectives and ontology. To address this issue, we formulate and incorporate dialogue acts, and leverage recent advances in machine reading comprehension to predict both categorical and non-categorical types of slots for multi-domain dialogue state tracking. Experimental results show that our models can improve the overall accuracy of dialogue state tracking on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset, and demonstrate that incorporating dialogue acts can guide dialogue state design for future task-oriented dialogue systems.Comment: Published in Spoken Dialogue Systems I, Interspeech 2021. Code is now publicly available on Github: https://github.com/youlandasu/ACT-AWARE-DS

Comprehensibility and the basic structures of dialogue

The study of what makes utterances difficult or easy to understand is one of the central topics of research in comprehension. It is both theoretically attractive and useful in practice. The more we know about difficulties in understanding the more we know about understanding. And the better we grasp typical problems of understanding in certain types of discourse and for certain recipients the better we can overcome these problems and the better we can advise people whose job it is to overcome such problems. It is therefore not surprising that comprehensibility has been the object of much reflection as far back as the days of classical rhetoric and that it is a center of lively interest in several present-day scientific disciplines, ranging from artificial intelligence and educational psychology to linguistics

AN ANALYSIS OF TEACHING LEARNING ACTIVITIES OF READING COMPREHENSION IN ENGLISH TEXT BOOK FOR FIRST YEAR JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

In this study, the writer is interested to analyze the teaching learning activities of reading comprehension I junior high school English textbook published by Erlangga, Yudistira, and Esis. In detail, this study is attended to (1) teaching learning activities of reading for the first year junior high school textbooks, (2) the most varieties of teaching and learning activity of reading, (3) the fewest variety of teaching and learning activity of reading. In this study, the writer used descriptive design to know the teaching and learning activities of reading comprehension in certain textbooks. The population was all of the English textbook in the first year junior high school based on the 2006 English curriculum and the sample of this research are English on Sky, The Bridge English Competence, and Flaying Start, English textbook for first year junior high school published by Erlangga, Yudistira, and Esis. The instruments used are documentation. The finding of this research shown that (1) teaching learning activities of reading comprehension in “English on Sky” textbook published by Erlangga consist of answering the question True (T) and False (F) based on the dialogue, matching the words with the picture, answering the questions based on the picture, reading text, answering the questions based on the text, completing the missing words in the text, matching question with the responses in the box. Teaching learning activities of reading comprehension in “The Bridge English Competence” textbook published by Yudistira consist of reading the number, answering the question True (T) or False (F) based on the text, reading the text, answering the question based on the text, reading the sentences with the correct pronunciation, reading a dialogue, answering the question based on the dialogue. Teaching learning activities of reading comprehension in “Flaying Start” textbook published by “Esis” consist of reading dialog and completing with the words from the box, answering the question True (T) and False (F) based on the dialogue, reading number, reading text, completing sentence based on the text, answering the questions True (T) and False (F) based on the text, making questions for the answers based on the text, reading sentences based on the picture, matching the picture with the subject, answering the questions based on the text. (2) The most varieties of teaching and learning activity of reading comprehension is “Flaying Start” English textbook published by Esis. (3) The fewest varieties of teaching and learning activity of reading comprehension are “English on Sky” Englis

On the automaticity of language processing

People speak and listen to language all the time. Given this high frequency of use, it is often suggested that at least some aspects of language processing are highly overlearned and therefore occur “automatically”. Here we critically examine this suggestion. We first sketch a framework that views automaticity as a set of interrelated features of mental processes and a matter of degree rather than a single feature that is all-or-none. We then apply this framework to language processing. To do so, we carve up the processes involved in language use according to (a) whether language processing takes place in monologue or dialogue, (b) whether the individual is comprehending or producing language, (c) whether the spoken or written modality is used, and (d) the linguistic processing level at which they occur, that is, phonology, the lexicon, syntax, or conceptual processes. This exercise suggests that while conceptual processes are relatively non-automatic (as is usually assumed), there is also considerable evidence that syntactic and lexical lower-level processes are not fully automatic. We close by discussing entrenchment as a set of mechanisms underlying automatization

Comprehension and the silent reader

Dr Elspeth Jajdelska's work on the rise of silent reading in the 18th century has shown that writers who assume a silent reader, as almost all writers do in the present day, construct their texts differently from those who write for readers to speak the text aloud to themselves or an audience, as almost all writers did before the 18th century.Elspeth Jajdelska's work explains in detail exactly which kinds of textual features are likely to be difficult for people (both now and in the past) who have learned the mechanics of reading but find it hard to follow texts written for silent readers. These findings arose in an academic field unconnected to educational studies and this knowledge exchange project was established to explore how the research can be made useful to teachers. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Referential precedents in spoken language comprehension: a review and meta-analysis

Listeners’ interpretations of referring expressions are influenced by referential precedents—temporary conventions established in a discourse that associate linguistic expressions with referents. A number of psycholinguistic studies have investigated how much precedent effects depend on beliefs about the speaker’s perspective versus more egocentric, domain-general processes. We review and provide a meta-analysis of visual-world eyetracking studies of precedent use, focusing on three principal effects: (1) a same speaker advantage for maintained precedents; (2) a different speaker advantage for broken precedents; and (3) an overall main effect of precedents. Despite inconsistent claims in the literature, our combined analysis reveals surprisingly consistent evidence supporting the existence of all three effects, but with different temporal profiles. These findings carry important implications for existing theoretical explanations of precedent use, and challenge explanations based solely on the use of information about speakers’ perspectives