Effect of cognitive & metacognitive Strategy developing reading comprehension emphasizing students’ linguality

Reading comprehension ability is potency of students to comprehend meaning of written texts, text details and main ideas. Furthermore, ability of reading comprehension activated learners to communicate with writers. To understand main ideas of written texts, help learners to be aware and to get particular messages from texts. Cognitive and metacognitive knowledges help readers to analyze, to summarize, to judge, and to distinguish main idea of reading texts and also more details about writer viewpoints to predicate and decision making to monitor text contents too. Monolingual students are those groups which must be aware about impacts of metacognitive strategy upon reading development and comprehension through to prepare and emanate bio feedbacks with teachers. Hence, monolingual groups have to be taught more than bilingual ones due to their low – proficiency levels and also their weak knowledge capacities about reading development strategies. Indeed, today understanding the effective strategies which help to learn language skills for all of scholars in TESOL domains is very significant, so every teacher that is aware about efficacy of those psychological strategies like cognitive and metacognitive or both; he or she is able to teach language skills particularly reading comprehension very conveniently and more productive language learning results. Without understanding reading strategy text comprehension to learn language skills is impossible.

Validated tests for language research with university students: Tests of vocabulary, general knowledge, author recognition, reading comprehension, reading frequency, attention check

We present five studies aimed at developing a new vocabulary test for university students. Such a test isuseful as an indication of crystallized intelligence and because vocabulary size correlates well withreading comprehension. In the first study, a list of 100 words based on Nation’s Vocabulary Size Test waspresented to 195 participants and compared to other tests of crystallized intelligence. Analysis suggestedthe presence of two distinct factors, which we interpreted as evidence for the possible existence of twotypes of difficult words: Unfamiliar words for general knowledge and unfamiliar words for specializedknowledge. In the subsequent studies we tried to develop vocabulary tests for each type of words, at thesame time trying out various reading comprehension tests to use as validation criterion. However, in thefinal study a high correlation (r =.82) was found between our two vocabulary tests, indicating that theymeasure the same latent factor, contrary to our initial assumption. Both tests have high reliability (r >.85) and correlate well (r > .4) with general knowledge, author recognition, and reading comprehension.As part of our research efforts, a collection of new and existing tests was used and (often) improved toverify the validity of the vocabulary tests. An exploratory factor analysis on all tests established 3 factors(text comprehension, crystallized intelligence, and reading rate), with the vocabulary tests loading on thefactor of crystallized intelligence, which in turn correlated with reading comprehension. Structuralequation modeling corroborated the interpretation. We end by providing an overview of the differenttests that were developed or improved throughout the studies. They are freely available for researchpurposes at https://osf.io/ef3s4/.

‘When most I wink, then’ – what? Assessing the comprehension of literary texts in university students of English as a second language

This article introduces a test for literary text comprehension in university students of English as a second language. Poetry is especially suited for our purpose since it frequently shows features that offer challenges to comprehension in a limited space. An example is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43, on which our test is based: it is suited for assessing not only if a text has been understood but also the ability of respondents to reflect on their own comprehension skills. We show that the test’s psychometric properties are satisfactory, and we demonstrate its validity by analysing relevant external indicators. Thus, we can show a direct link between general reading experience and text comprehension as tested: the more students read, the better do they perform. The collaboration of literary studies with psychometrics moreover allows for a statistically valid identification of specific challenges to comprehension and thus advance our knowledge of what readers find difficult. This will be of interest not only in a hermeneutic and linguistic perspective but also with a view to addressing those difficulties in an educational context. For example, asking someone whether they have understood an utterance (in this case: a line of poetry) does not elicit reliable answers. Being able to say how one has established the meaning of a line seems to be a more reliable indicator of actually having understood it.

Technological Solutions for Sustainable Development: Effects of a Visual Prompt Scaffolding-Based Virtual Reality Approach on EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension, Learning Attitude, Motivation, and Anxiety

As is indicated by the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 4, it is crucial to have access to inclusive and quality education for all. For English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, reading English is a basic skill for learners to acquire and exchange information and to have lifelong learning experiences. To provide a vivid EFL learning environment, a visual prompt scaffolding-based VR (VPS-VR) approach was proposed to enhance students’ reading comprehension skills. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, an experiment was conducted in an English reading course at a Chinese university. Students from experimental group A (N = 31) learned with the VPS-VR approach, experimental group B (N = 32) learned with the virtual reality (VR) approach, and the control group learned with the traditional instruction (TI) approach. The results revealed the positive effects of the VPS-VR approach on students’ EFL reading comprehension, learning motivation, and English learning anxiety. Furthermore, it was also found that experimental students’ lower-level skills of reading comprehension, such as information location and text comprehension, were significantly improved, rather than the higher-level skills of reflection and evaluation. Fifteen students participated in interviews, and their learning experience and technology acceptance are also discussed.

Immediate recall as a secondary text: Referential parameters, pragmatics and propositions

Since the process of recalling combines comprehension and speech production, it is viewed as an extremely complex though understudied linguo-cognitive phenomenon. Recalls as secondary texts or text derivatives are also considered to be a good material to explore cognitive aspects of secondary texts production, information conversion procedures and types of transformations of primary texts. The notion of secondary texts also implies multiplicity, as an original text may be retranslated into numerous secondary texts different in quality and degree of completeness. The purpose of the study is to model the propositional secondary retold texts and to identify the specifics of the recipients interpretation of the main event in the text. It is aimed at discriminating the differences between the primary expository text and its 134 immediate recalls produced by 15-year old native Russian speakers. In order to reveal the specifics of the propositional content of a primary expository text and its recalls, their recipients used the following methodological operations: the description and interpretation of the semantic roles of the first and second arguments aligned to predicates on the basis of the verbs semantic properties; the employment of the psycholinguistic model of the utterances generation; the characteristic of memory as a complex of cognitive and mnemic processes; the definition of cognitive-semantic discourse structures; and the understanding of a proposition as a stable component of an utterance independent of the surface grammar. The comparison of the original text and its recalls with the use of innovative denotative maps enabled us to define successful and unsuccessful expression of propositional structures and the main idea of the original text. The classification of texts includes four groups based on the number of the reproduced propositions and types (weak or successful) of the reflection of the primary text denotative card. The authors designed and successfully implemented an innovative 11 stage-algorithm of revealing patterns of a printed text comprehension and its immediate recalls including the primary visual perception of the text, its primary interpretation, reading, encoding, reflection, preparation for an oral presentation, desobjectivation (distribution of semantic roles), interpretation, reflection, oral implementation and text. The work fills in certain gaps in the research, such as the specifics of immediate recalls production, identification of changes in propositional structures of immediate recalls, and expanding the corpus of semantic roles similar to Frame Net. The findings can be successfully applied in natural language processing and linguistic didactics.

Information Density and the Extraposition of German Relative Clauses

This paper aims to find a correlation between Information Density (ID) and extraposition of Relative Clauses (RC) in Early New High German. Since surprisal is connected to perceiving difficulties, the impact on the working memory is lower for frequent combinations with low surprisal-values than it is for rare combinations with higher surprisal-values. To improve text comprehension, producers therefore distribute information as evenly as possible across a discourse. Extraposed RC are expected to have a higher surprisal-value than embedded RC. We intend to find evidence for this idea in RC taken from scientific texts from the 17th to 19th century. We built a corpus of tokenized, lemmatized and normalized papers about medicine from the 17th and 19th century, manually determined the RC-variants and calculated a skipgram-Language Model to compute the 2-Skip-bigram surprisal of every word of the relevant sentences. A logistic regression over the summed up surprisal values shows a significant result, which indicates a correlation between surprisal values and extraposition. So, for these periods it can be said that RC are more likely to be extraposed when they have a high total surprisal value. The influence of surprisal values also seems to be stable across time. The comparison of the analyzed language periods shows no significant change.

Fostering incidental vocabulary uptake from audio-visual materials: The role of text comprehension

<p>This research project explores various factors that may influence the rate of incidental foreign/second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition from audio-visual materials, with a special focus on procedures that enhance learners’ comprehension of these input materials. Informed by relevant theories and research findings in the fields of L2 listening comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition, I investigate the effects of having learners (a) view a TED Talks video twice rather than once, (b) sum up the content of the video before watching it a second time, (c) watch TED Talks videos on the same subject in order to increase familiarity with that subject, and (d) exchange summaries of TED Talks videos with peers so as to assist each other’s subsequent processing of those videos. As these interventions are all deemed to facilitate L2 listening comprehension, they are also expected to create favourable conditions for incidental vocabulary uptake to occur. The effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition of the above interventions were gauged in a series of classroom experiments with Vietnamese EFL learners. Although vocabulary uptake was generally far from spectacular, all of the tested procedures were found to result in statistically significant vocabulary gains. The insertion of the output tasks (i.e., the summary activities) was particularly useful. First, they helped to enhance the learners’ text comprehension. Second, they created opportunities for the learners to use newly met words and thus consolidate their knowledge of these lexical items. A thread through the experimental data is the strong association between the learners’ vocabulary uptake and their comprehension of the input content. The findings from this research project are consistent with several established notions, models and theories in the fields, including Ausubel’s Advance Organizer (1978), Hulstijn and Laufer’s Involvement Load Hypothesis (2001), Krashen’s Input Hypothesis (1985), Nation’s Vocabulary Generation (2013), Swain’s Output Hypothesis (2005), and Wittrock’s Model of Generative Teaching of Comprehension (1991). However, there are also findings that go beyond the core tenets of these, and that can further our understanding of how learners process new lexical items in meaning-focused input and output tasks. Regarding pedagogical implications, this research project confirms that fostering L2 listening comprehension creates favourable conditions for incidental vocabulary acquisition to happen, and that the aforementioned classroom procedures are facilitative in this regard, albeit to different degrees.</p>

Fostering incidental vocabulary uptake from audio-visual materials: The role of text comprehension

<p>This research project explores various factors that may influence the rate of incidental foreign/second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition from audio-visual materials, with a special focus on procedures that enhance learners’ comprehension of these input materials. Informed by relevant theories and research findings in the fields of L2 listening comprehension and incidental vocabulary acquisition, I investigate the effects of having learners (a) view a TED Talks video twice rather than once, (b) sum up the content of the video before watching it a second time, (c) watch TED Talks videos on the same subject in order to increase familiarity with that subject, and (d) exchange summaries of TED Talks videos with peers so as to assist each other’s subsequent processing of those videos. As these interventions are all deemed to facilitate L2 listening comprehension, they are also expected to create favourable conditions for incidental vocabulary uptake to occur. The effects on incidental vocabulary acquisition of the above interventions were gauged in a series of classroom experiments with Vietnamese EFL learners. Although vocabulary uptake was generally far from spectacular, all of the tested procedures were found to result in statistically significant vocabulary gains. The insertion of the output tasks (i.e., the summary activities) was particularly useful. First, they helped to enhance the learners’ text comprehension. Second, they created opportunities for the learners to use newly met words and thus consolidate their knowledge of these lexical items. A thread through the experimental data is the strong association between the learners’ vocabulary uptake and their comprehension of the input content. The findings from this research project are consistent with several established notions, models and theories in the fields, including Ausubel’s Advance Organizer (1978), Hulstijn and Laufer’s Involvement Load Hypothesis (2001), Krashen’s Input Hypothesis (1985), Nation’s Vocabulary Generation (2013), Swain’s Output Hypothesis (2005), and Wittrock’s Model of Generative Teaching of Comprehension (1991). However, there are also findings that go beyond the core tenets of these, and that can further our understanding of how learners process new lexical items in meaning-focused input and output tasks. Regarding pedagogical implications, this research project confirms that fostering L2 listening comprehension creates favourable conditions for incidental vocabulary acquisition to happen, and that the aforementioned classroom procedures are facilitative in this regard, albeit to different degrees.</p>