scholarly journals Fostering reading comprehension of expository texts through the activation of readers’ prior knowledge and inference-making skills

2015 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 80-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Tarchi
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Prior Knowledge ◽  
Expository Texts ◽  
Inference Making

scholarly journals Interest and Prior Knowledge in Second Language Reading Comprehension

2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 149 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Eidswick
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Prior Knowledge ◽  
Private University ◽  
Second Language Reading ◽  
Expository Texts ◽  
Future Research ◽  
High Interest ◽  
Second Language Reading Comprehension ◽  
English Program

The influence of interest on learning is well-established in educational psychology, but little interest research has been conducted in the field of second language (L2) learning. This study examined interest and an associated factor, prior knowledge, in relation to reading comprehension. Intermediate-level sophomore students in an English program at a private university in Japan (N = 23) rated their interest in and knowledge of 11 topics. Correlations between interest and prior knowledge were significant only for topics related to famous individuals. Participants read expository texts about selections from the topic list with high interest-high prior knowledge (HH), high interest-low prior knowledge (HL), and low interest-low prior knowledge (LL), then took multiple-choice comprehension tests. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) procedures revealed significant differences between scores for the HH text and those of the HL and LL texts. Implications of correlations and test score differences are discussed, and suggestions for future research are offered. 興味・関心が学習に影響を与えることは教育心理学において十分に立証されているにもかかわらず、第二言語(L2)の学習においては、興味・関心に関する研究は従来ほとんど行われてこなかった。本研究では、英文読解に関し、興味・関心およびそれに関連する要因である事前知識についての調査を行った。日本の私立大学の英語プログラムにおいて、中級レベルのクラスで学ぶ２年次の学生（23名）が、11のトピックに対して自分が持つ興味・関心の高さと知識の量の格付けを行った。興味・関心の高さと事前知識の量の間には、著名な人物に関するトピックの場合にのみ、有意の相関が見られた。学生たちは前述のトピックの中から、興味・関心が高く事前知識が多い(HH)、興味・関心が高く事前知識が少ない(HL)、興味・関心が低く事前知識が少ない(LL)トピックを選び、それらに関する説明文を読んだ後、選択問題形式の読解テストを受けた。テストの成績に対して分散分析 (ANOVA)を行った結果、HHの説明文に対する成績が、HLおよびLLの説明文に対する成績と有意に異なっていることが明らかになった。これらの相関およびテストの成績の相違が意味するものについて考察し、今後の研究への提言を述べる。

EFFECTS OF LANGUAGE AND PRIOR KNOWLEDGE LEVELS ON HYPERTEXT READING COMPREHENSION

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kshema Jose
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Prior Knowledge ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Language Competence ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Reading Order ◽  
Low Levels ◽  
Online Texts ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
Better Than

<p>This study observed how two hypertext features – absence of a linear or author-specified order and availability of multiple reading aids – influence reading comprehension processes of ESL readers. Studies with native or highly proficient users of English, have suggested that readers reading hypertexts comprehend better than readers reading print texts. This was attributed to (i) presence of hyperlinks that provide access to additional information that can potentially help overcome comprehension obstacles and (ii) the absence of an author-imposed reading order that helps readers exercise cognitive flexibility. An aspect that remains largely un-researched is how well readers with low language competence comprehend hypertexts. This research sought to initiate research in the area by exploring the question: Do all ESL readers comprehend a hypertext better than a print text?</p> <p>Keeping in mind the fact that a majority of readers reading online texts in English can be hindered by three types of comprehension deficits – low levels of language proficiency, non-availability of prior knowledge, or both – this study investigated how two characteristic features of hypertext, viz., linking to additional information and non-linearity in presentation of information, affect reading comprehension of ESL readers. </p> <p>Two types of texts that occur in the electronic medium – linear or pre-structured texts and non-linear or self-navigating texts, were used in this study. Based on a comparison of subjects’ comprehension outcomes and free recalls, text factors and reader factors that can influence hypertext reading comprehension of ESL readers are identified. </p> Contradictory to what many researchers believe, results indicate that self-navigating hypertexts might not promote deep comprehension in all ESL readers.

Emergent Bilinguals With Specific Reading Comprehension Deficits: A Comparative and Longitudinal Analysis

2020 ◽  
pp. 002221942098324
Author(s):  
Ana Taboada Barber ◽  
Susan Lutz Klauda ◽  
Weimeng Wang ◽  
Kelly B. Cartwright ◽  
Laurie E. Cutting
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Oral Language ◽  
Word Identification ◽  
Reading Engagement ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Inference Making ◽  
Poor Reading ◽  
Emergent Bilingual ◽  
Specific Reading ◽  
Insight Into

This study centered on emergent bilingual (EB) students with specific reading comprehension deficits (S-RCD), that is, with poor reading comprehension despite solid word identification skills. The participants were 209 students in Grades 2 to 4, including both EBs and English Monolinguals (EMs) with and without S-RCD. Mean comparisons indicated that EBs and EMs with S-RCD showed weaknesses relative to typically developing (TD) readers in oral language, word identification, inference making, and reading engagement, but not in executive functioning. Longitudinal analyses indicated that across two academic years S-RCD persisted for 41% of EBs and EMs alike. Altogether, the study extends research on EBs with S-RCD by identifying variables beyond oral language that may account for their reading comprehension difficulties and providing insight into the extent to which their reading comprehension and word identification performance levels evolve during elementary school. Furthermore, the findings point to the importance of early identification and intervention for weaknesses in reading comprehension and its component elements in both EBs and EMS.

scholarly journals Investigating Prior Knowledge for Challenging Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
Kai Sun ◽  
Dian Yu ◽  
Dong Yu ◽  
Claire Cardie
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Prior Knowledge ◽  
Data Augmentation ◽  
Multiple Choice ◽  
Model Performance ◽  
Free Form ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Significant Performance ◽  
Machine Reading

Machine reading comprehension tasks require a machine reader to answer questions relevant to the given document. In this paper, we present the first free-form multiple-Choice Chinese machine reading Comprehension dataset (C3), containing 13,369 documents (dialogues or more formally written mixed-genre texts) and their associated 19,577 multiple-choice free-form questions collected from Chinese-as-a-second-language examinations. We present a comprehensive analysis of the prior knowledge (i.e., linguistic, domain-specific, and general world knowledge) needed for these real-world problems. We implement rule-based and popular neural methods and find that there is still a significant performance gap between the best performing model (68.5%) and human readers (96.0%), especiallyon problems that require prior knowledge. We further study the effects of distractor plausibility and data augmentation based on translated relevant datasets for English on model performance. We expect C3 to present great challenges to existing systems as answering 86.8% of questions requires both knowledge within and beyond the accompanying document, and we hope that C3 can serve as a platform to study how to leverage various kinds of prior knowledge to better understand a given written or orally oriented text. C3 is available at https://dataset.org/c3/ .

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