Readers’ cognitive processes during IELTS reading tests: evidence from eye tracking

The research described in this report investigates readers' mental processes as they complete onscreen IELTS (International English Language Testing System) reading test items. It employs up-to-date eye tracking technology to research readers' eye movements and aims, among other things, to contribute to an understanding of the cognitive validity of reading test items (Glaser. 1991; Field forthcoming). Participants were a group of Malaysian undergraduates (n=71) taking an onscreen test consisting of two IELTS reading passages with a total of 11 test items. The eye movements of a random sample of these participants (n=38) were tracked. Questionnaire and stimulated recall interview data were also collected, and were important in order to interpret and explain the eye tracking data. Findings demonstrated significant differences between successful and unsuccessful test-takers on a number of dimensions, including their ability to read expeditiously (Khalifa and Weir. 2009). and their focus on particular aspects of the test items and the reading texts. This demonstrates the potential of eye tracking, in combination with post- hoc interview and questionnaire data, to offer new insights into the cognitive processes of successful and unsuccessful candidates in a reading test. It also gives unprecedented insights into the cognitive processing of successful and unsuccessful readers doing language tests. As a consequence, the findings should be of value to teachers and learners, and also to examination boards seeking to validate and prepare reading tests, as well as psycholinguists and others interested in the cognitive processes of readers

Discount Coupons: Beyond the Price Discount Effect

Paper included in Proceedings from the Promotion in the Marketing Mix: What Works, Where and Why, NEC-63 Conference, Toronto, Canada, 1994. Ellen Goddard and Daphne Taylor, editors, pp.42-52.Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis,

Visual illusions: An interesting tool to investigate developmental dyslexia and autism spectrum disorder

A visual illusion refers to a percept that is different in some aspect from the physical stimulus. Illusions are a powerful non-invasive tool for understanding the neurobiology of vision, telling us, indirectly, how the brain processes visual stimuli. There are some neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by visual deficits. Surprisingly, just a few studies investigated illusory perception in clinical populations. Our aim is to review the literature supporting a possible role for visual illusions in helping us understand the visual deficits in developmental dyslexia and autism spectrum disorder. Future studies could develop new tools – based on visual illusions – to identify an early risk for neurodevelopmental disorders

Linguistic and non-linguistic outcomes of a reading-while-listening program for young learners of English

Reading-while-listening, which consists of reading while simultaneously listening to an oral rendition of the text, may be especially well suited for young language learners because of the multimodality provided in many graded readers aimed at this age group (ie.,, the presence of oral and written text and illustrations). This study compares a group of Grade 5 students who were exposed to 18 sessions of reading-while-listening with a group exposed to the same number of sessions through reading-only, and a control group. Linguistic outcomes show that students in the two intervention groups obtained higher vocabulary gains than those in the control group but did not present superior scores in reading or listening comprehension or reading fluency. Non-linguistic outcomes showed a clear preference on the part of the students for the reading-while-listening mode of input. The study concludes that the lack of differences in comprehension and fluency gains may be due to the fact that graded readers for children are too short; the input they offer is too limited to make a difference in areas other than attitudes and vocabulary learning

Tourette syndrome research highlights 2015 [version 1; referees: 3 approved]

We present selected highlights from research that appeared during 2015 on Tourette syndrome and other tic disorders. Topics include phenomenology, comorbidities, developmental course, genetics, animal models, neuroimaging, electrophysiology, pharmacology, and treatment. We briefly summarize articles whose results we believe may lead to new treatments, additional research or modifications in current models of TS

Farmville, 1963: The Long Hot Summer

On July 9, 1963, a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch informed his readers that black protesters had attempted two sit-ins in the college town of Farmville, the hub of rural Prince Edward County. Obviously shocked by these developments, he termed the events at the College Shoppe restaurant and the State Theater the first reported Negro movement in this Southside Virginia locality, which has gained prominence in recent years as the focal point of a struggle over the closings of Prince Edward County\u27s schools. In this writer\u27s mind, and perhaps many of his readers\u27 as well, social movements were synonymous with street protest. In reality, however, the two are not one and the same. The Prince Edward freedom movement did not begin in the streets, but rather in the schools. The 1951 student strike at R. R. Moton High School launched a decade of unprecedented activism on both sides of the color line. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court\u27s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, whites dismantled the public school system, pouring their energies into creating a homegrown whites-only private school system. African Americans, with the help of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), challenged the county\u27s actions in court, scoured the region for new black voters, and developed grassroots community schools to temporarily educate their children. [excerpt

Several Sigourneys : Circulation, Reprint Culture, and Sigourney’s Educational Prose

In her now-famous essay Reinventing Lydia Sigourney, Nina Baym argued that Sigourney\u27s literary range inevitably allows for the construction of several Sigourneys who are unknown to modern criticism. 1 Since 1990, when Baym revealed Sigourney as a student of history and a writer of historical prose, scholars have filled the gap she identified with a variety of Sigourneys, identifying her generic plurality\u27\u27 as a means to achieve multi-positionality as a woman poet, as Paula Bernat Bennett writes, and noting that Sigourney\u27s wide-ranging oeuvre does not readily lend itself to a reading of the author as a sentimental poetess. 2 Subsequently, scholars like Bennett, Wendy Oasler Johnson, and Elizabeth Petrino have taken up the call to reinvent, reconsider, or, as Dasler Johnson strives to do, revive Sigourney as a complex poet worthy of scholarly consideration. But while such scholars acknowledge Sigourney\u27s range of genres, few have focused on her prose. Even as they acknowledge it, they leave it, as Allison Giffen says, all but overlooked. 3 In this chapter, I fill this gap by focusing on the reinvention of Sigourney as an educator who used her prose to advance her educational causes. Many scholars have remarked on her educational program, and she herself was admittedly always the teacher, identifying herself as a schoolmistress and a literary woman. 4 For example, in chapter 12, Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso pays similar attention to Sigourney\u27s didactic use of history and biography, which connects hers to the educational projects of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other transcendentalists. In From School to Salon, Mary Loeffelholz offers perhaps the most extended attention to the centrality of schooling to Sigourney\u27s writing and life. Loeffelholz suggests that we consider the school as the common social location ... of Sigourney\u27s poetic and prose genres, inseparable from their matrix of republican ideas. 5 That is, she frames schooling and Sigourney\u27s identity as a teacher-rather than the home and motherhood-as central to the writer\u27s work as a whole. 6 In her attention to the school, Loeffelholz raises a question that is central to my own essay: Is the authority of the teacher modeled on that of the mother, or that of the mother on the teacher? She answers, For Lydia Sigourney, the role of the teacher came first, nor just biographically but historically, ideologically, and almost, it seems ontologically. 7 I would add that, while Sigourney positioned herself in relation to domestic culture in her early work, she developed an increasingly professional authorial persona in relation to education that drew on the authority of mothers but was increasingly distanced from the home. In other words, she spoke to maternal teachers in her earlier essays; but by the late 1830s and 1840s, as the schoolroom became an accepted site of practice for women students and teachers, she increasingly intervened in conversations about formal, extra-domestic schooling. Further, in Sigourney\u27s broad circulation of her educational essays, we can clearly trace the evolution of her ideas about education and gender and about herself as a woman educator, which changed as the cultural terrain around women\u27s education shifted, particularly in regard to what Loeffelholz calls the emergence of the domestic- tutelary regime, in ways she did not always control.