Improving English Reading Skill through the Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) Strategy at Nursing Student

Reading is an integral part of the entire learning process experienced by students while studying at school. Reading can increase vocabulary and knowledge of grammar and syntax. DRTA (Directed Reading Thinking Activity) is a technique that encourages students to make predictions while they are reading. The research was to describe the process reading skill understanding and improving, implementing reading strategy (DRTA) at 3rd grade students in the 5th semester of the Bachelor of Nursing study program STIKES Bina Sehat PPNI Mojokerto. The research method was Classroom Action Research (CAR) with one cycle. The result shows that The Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) strategy can help students understand the contents of the reading. Students also find it easier to answer the questions posed according to the content of the reading and also easier to retell the contents of the reading they have read using their own language according to their understanding.

Paired Reading Strategy and Comprehension Level Among Grade 10 Students

This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of paired – reading strategy in improving the reading comprehension of Grade ten learners. In this study, the subjects were profiled first about their age, sex, parents’ highest educational attainment, family income and availability of reading materials. Then, the subjects reading comprehension level was also determined before and after the exposure in paired – reading strategy.The subjects of this study are the Grade 10 – Ruby learners which are assigned as control group and Grade 10 – Jade learners which were assigned as experimental group. Both groups are enrolled in Palina East National High School, Urdaneta City, Pangasinan, where the study was conducted, during the school year 2019 – 2020.In this study, the researcher utilized descriptive research design in addressing the problems about the profile of the subjects and their reading comprehension level. Then, a quasi - experimental research design was also used to determine the effectiveness of paired reading strategy in improving the reading comprehension of the learners. And in gathering the data needed in this study, a test which is the Oral Reading Comprehension assessment was utilized.Findings of the study revealed that both groups, the control and the experimental group, are at the literal level of reading comprehension before exposing to paired – reading strategy, then after the experimentation, the control group reached the interpretive level of reading comprehension while the experimental group reached the applied level of reading comprehension. Results were further supported by the findings of test of difference between the post-test of both groups which revealed that the experimental group had statistically better performance compared to the control group. Thus, paired reading strategy is more effective than traditional teaching in facilitating reading comprehension among learners.

Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategy Use between Field-Dependent and Field-Independent EFL Learners

This paper aimed to study the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies between field-dependent (FD)and field-independent (FI) Turkish EFL university students who are learning English as a foreign language. To this end, 270 students from Istanbul (Cerrahpasa) University were chosen.First, Group Embedded Figure Test was used to appoint the participants into either FD or FI groups.After this, participants’ metacognitive awareness of reading strategy was assessed by using MARSI-R (Metacognitive Awareness of reading Strategies Inventory-Revised). Recently revised by Mokhtari et al., the MARSI-R instrument contains 15 items and measures three large sets of strategies including: Global Reading Strategies (GRS), Problem-Solving Strategies (PSS) and Support Reading Strategies (SRS).The results showed that the students reported using the 3 categories of strategies almost at a high-frequency level and they were aware of their metacognitive strategies. And statistically significant difference was found between FI and FD students regarding their use of GRS and SRS, hence, the use of students’ metacognitive reading strategies was affected by their different FI/FD cognitive styles.

The effect of audio-support on strategy, time, and performance on reading comprehension in secondary school students with dyslexia

The use of adequate reading comprehension strategies is important to read efficiently. Students with dyslexia not only read slower and less accurately, they also use fewer reading comprehension strategies. To compensate for their decoding problems, they often receive audio-support (narration written text). However, audio-support linearly guides readers from beginning to end through texts, possibly hindering the use of reading comprehension strategies in expository texts and negatively impacting reading time and reading comprehension performance. We examined to what extent audio-support affects reading comprehension strategies, reading times, and reading comprehension performance in 21 secondary school students with dyslexia and 22 typically developing controls. Participants were provided with three types of assignments (summarizing, open-ended questions, statement questions) in each condition (written text with and without audio-support). SMI RED-500 eye tracker captured eye movements during reading. The standard deviation of the weighted fixation duration times on the three paragraphs was considered indicative of the disparity of readers’ attention within the text. Following a discrimination based on experts’ reading behavior and hand-coded validation, these scores visualized whether students used the intensive reading strategy (reading whole text) or selective reading strategy (focusing on part of the text). In open-ended assignments, students divided their attention more over the whole text instead of focusing on one specific part when audio was added. In addition, audio-support increased reading time in students with and without dyslexia in most tasks, while in neither of the tasks audio-support affected reading comprehension performance. Audio-support impacts reading comprehension strategy and reading time in all students.

Five Murders in a Fictional City

<p>Dashiell Hammett is best remembered for a series of attributes that are at best chimerical and at worst outright misleading. This thesis will briefly look at each of these red herrings and how they originated before offering an alternate theory for interpreting his work. The superseded reading strategies are: that he invented the hard-boiled detective – as exemplified by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon; that he translated his real-life experience as a detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency into his fiction, thereby giving it a realistic, quasi-factual quality; and his unique combination of the excess and hedonism of the "roaring 20s" with a brand of nascent communism are deeply coded in his fiction. The foundation for all of these misconceptions is the dialogue between Howard Haycraft's description of him in Murder for Pleasure and Raymond Chandler’s response, in the famous essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”. The one truth that they agree on, and which survives in the critical discourse is that Hammett was an innovative and effective prose stylist. This thesis looks past these conceptions of Hammett, and offers an alternate quality for which Hammett should be remembered: his reconfiguration of the detective formula not as a means in and of itself, but as a building block for stories that have a traditional novelistic value. This thesis uses five of the murders amongst the numerous killings in Red Harvest to illustrate this reading strategy in detail. Hammett's reconfiguration of this central genre feature lives on in numerous modern works of fiction and film that are broadly in the action or adventure genres.</p>

Five Murders in a Fictional City

<p>Dashiell Hammett is best remembered for a series of attributes that are at best chimerical and at worst outright misleading. This thesis will briefly look at each of these red herrings and how they originated before offering an alternate theory for interpreting his work. The superseded reading strategies are: that he invented the hard-boiled detective – as exemplified by Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon; that he translated his real-life experience as a detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency into his fiction, thereby giving it a realistic, quasi-factual quality; and his unique combination of the excess and hedonism of the "roaring 20s" with a brand of nascent communism are deeply coded in his fiction. The foundation for all of these misconceptions is the dialogue between Howard Haycraft's description of him in Murder for Pleasure and Raymond Chandler’s response, in the famous essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”. The one truth that they agree on, and which survives in the critical discourse is that Hammett was an innovative and effective prose stylist. This thesis looks past these conceptions of Hammett, and offers an alternate quality for which Hammett should be remembered: his reconfiguration of the detective formula not as a means in and of itself, but as a building block for stories that have a traditional novelistic value. This thesis uses five of the murders amongst the numerous killings in Red Harvest to illustrate this reading strategy in detail. Hammett's reconfiguration of this central genre feature lives on in numerous modern works of fiction and film that are broadly in the action or adventure genres.</p>

The Effects of Proficiency on Sub-Lexical Processing in Bilingual Visual Word Recognition

<p>Systematic psycholinguistic research has considered the nature of the coexistence of two (or more) languages in the cognitive system of a fluent bilingual speaker. There is increasing consensus that when a bilingual is presented with a visual stimulus in one language, both of their languages are initially activated (non-selective access; e.g. Dijkstra & van Heuven 2002a). However, more recent research shows that certain factors may constrain (or eliminate) the activation of a task-irrelevant language (Duyck, van Assche, Drieghe, & Hartsuiker 2007; Elston-Güttler, Gunter, & Kotz 2005). The objective of the research in this thesis was to investigate how cross-linguistic activation is modulated by specific characteristics of a bilingual’s languages. This exploration was mainly limited to an under-investigated area, namely early sub-lexical word processing. The first of two studies focussed on word processing in the presence or absence of critical sub-lexical information. Specifically, I investigated whether onset capitals – a prominent marker indicating nouns in German – acted as a language-specific cue, and the extent to which this cue constrains competitive, lexical interaction between the bilingual’s languages (e.g. Hose-hose, the first being a German word meaning ‘trousers’ in English). This study also considered the extent to which the use of such information is affected by priming for a specific language from a preceding context sentence. The second study arose from a claim that readers employ distinct sub-lexical reading strategies, depending on the extent of spelling-to-sound (in)consistency in their language (e.g. Ziegler, Perry, Jacobs, & Braun 2001). Employing a bilingual population whose two languages were clearly distinguished in terms of such consistency, I explored the reading strategy used by bilingual participants reading in each language. A key issue is competitive activation between sub-lexical orthographic and phonological representations across languages. Each study was conducted with two groups of bilingual speakers, English-German and German-English. Individuals varied in their L2 proficiency, allowing a test of whether sub-lexical processing changed as a consequence of increasing proficiency. The main results from study one demonstrate that bilingual speakers are dependent upon sub-lexical, language-specific information. However, this is influenced by L2 proficiency, with a stronger effect for lower proficiency bilinguals. In addition, lower proficiency bilinguals were more dependent on sub-lexical cues when primed by a sentence in L2. In contrast, bilingual speakers performing in their L1 used these cues largely under very specific circumstances, i.e. when they did not know an item. The central finding of study two is that competition between sub-lexical orthographic and phonological representations across languages largely depends on the amount of spelling-to-sound (in)consistency in the bilinguals’ more dominant language. This is reflected in (1) slower identification of orthographically similar cognates which map onto different phonological representations across two languages, and (2) slower identification of cognates which do not share the same orthographic form across languages but have a common phonological representation. In addition, increasing L2 proficiency is reflected in attenuation of certain effects as processing becomes more automatic, and the development of a common reading strategy accommodating reading in either language. A major contribution of the research conducted is what findings from both studies reveal about how the bilingual lexicon develops as proficiency increases. Furthermore, the findings contribute to our understanding of the organisation of the bilingual mental lexicon and the processes of word identification, and impose constraints on possible cognitive architectures.</p>

The Effects of Proficiency on Sub-Lexical Processing in Bilingual Visual Word Recognition

<p>Systematic psycholinguistic research has considered the nature of the coexistence of two (or more) languages in the cognitive system of a fluent bilingual speaker. There is increasing consensus that when a bilingual is presented with a visual stimulus in one language, both of their languages are initially activated (non-selective access; e.g. Dijkstra & van Heuven 2002a). However, more recent research shows that certain factors may constrain (or eliminate) the activation of a task-irrelevant language (Duyck, van Assche, Drieghe, & Hartsuiker 2007; Elston-Güttler, Gunter, & Kotz 2005). The objective of the research in this thesis was to investigate how cross-linguistic activation is modulated by specific characteristics of a bilingual’s languages. This exploration was mainly limited to an under-investigated area, namely early sub-lexical word processing. The first of two studies focussed on word processing in the presence or absence of critical sub-lexical information. Specifically, I investigated whether onset capitals – a prominent marker indicating nouns in German – acted as a language-specific cue, and the extent to which this cue constrains competitive, lexical interaction between the bilingual’s languages (e.g. Hose-hose, the first being a German word meaning ‘trousers’ in English). This study also considered the extent to which the use of such information is affected by priming for a specific language from a preceding context sentence. The second study arose from a claim that readers employ distinct sub-lexical reading strategies, depending on the extent of spelling-to-sound (in)consistency in their language (e.g. Ziegler, Perry, Jacobs, & Braun 2001). Employing a bilingual population whose two languages were clearly distinguished in terms of such consistency, I explored the reading strategy used by bilingual participants reading in each language. A key issue is competitive activation between sub-lexical orthographic and phonological representations across languages. Each study was conducted with two groups of bilingual speakers, English-German and German-English. Individuals varied in their L2 proficiency, allowing a test of whether sub-lexical processing changed as a consequence of increasing proficiency. The main results from study one demonstrate that bilingual speakers are dependent upon sub-lexical, language-specific information. However, this is influenced by L2 proficiency, with a stronger effect for lower proficiency bilinguals. In addition, lower proficiency bilinguals were more dependent on sub-lexical cues when primed by a sentence in L2. In contrast, bilingual speakers performing in their L1 used these cues largely under very specific circumstances, i.e. when they did not know an item. The central finding of study two is that competition between sub-lexical orthographic and phonological representations across languages largely depends on the amount of spelling-to-sound (in)consistency in the bilinguals’ more dominant language. This is reflected in (1) slower identification of orthographically similar cognates which map onto different phonological representations across two languages, and (2) slower identification of cognates which do not share the same orthographic form across languages but have a common phonological representation. In addition, increasing L2 proficiency is reflected in attenuation of certain effects as processing becomes more automatic, and the development of a common reading strategy accommodating reading in either language. A major contribution of the research conducted is what findings from both studies reveal about how the bilingual lexicon develops as proficiency increases. Furthermore, the findings contribute to our understanding of the organisation of the bilingual mental lexicon and the processes of word identification, and impose constraints on possible cognitive architectures.</p>

Examining the Effectiveness of Think-Aloud Procedure and Reading Strategy Inventory: Insights From Reading Process Research

A study was conducted to explore the reading strategies of ESL (English as a Second Language) engineering students. The subjects of the study were 52 B.Tech students. The research focused on investigating the reading process of ESL students. The think-aloud procedure and reading strategy inventory were used to collect the data. Three pilot studies were conducted to validate quantitative and qualitative research procedures. A 40-item reading strategy inventory was administered to identify the engineering students' reading strategy use. The scores obtained in the reading strategy inventory has been compared to the verbal reports elicited through the think-aloud procedure. Data analysis presents an overview of the frequency of strategy use while reading an academic-related text. The paper examines the effectiveness of reading strategy inventory and think-aloud procedure for reading process research. The findings of the study discuss the data collection procedure relevant to reading process research. The study highlights challenges in validating quantitative and qualitative research procedures and suggests ways to overcome them.

Enhancing scientific argumentation skill through partnership comprehensive literacy

This study focuses on the use of Partnership Comprehensive Literacy (PCL) as a reading strategy to support reading in science and to explore the level of students’ Scientific argument. Partnership Comprehensive Literacy consist of 4 components that address the topic of the reading activity: the statements of the content, what I think, what the texts say, and evidence of the text. This study uses a mix method to identify and improve students’ scientific argumentation skills. The instrument used is a set of questions about electricity and magnetism. In addition, the argument level rubric instrument that contains argument components is used to analyse the level of students’ scientific arguments. The participants of this study were 40 college students consisting of 25 females and 15 males in the department of physics education taking a course in the fundamental of physics. The findings revealed that the students’ level argument was dominated by the use of Claim-Reasoning-Evidence (CRE). In addition, students evaluated that the use of PCL in reading activity as being challenging but an interesting process because they have to find the evidence in the texts to support their statements of what I think.