Specific EF-Related Tasks and Reading in Adolescents With Typical Hearing or a Cochlear Implant

The acquisition of effective reading comprehension for adolescents with cochlear implant (CI) in inclusive settings is crucial for ensuring the benefit of current traditional reading curricula and instructional practices. Executive functions (EF) are recognized as important cognitive processes during reading by students with typical hearing (TH). This study compared the relationship between EF and reading comprehension in adolescents with TH and CI. Three tests sessions were performed on two groups of adolescents between 12 and 16 years old (36 with CI and 54 with TH). Reading comprehension was assessed by a standardized reading battery and EF by computerized tests. The results indicated that adolescents with CI perform EF tasks with a similar efficiency as the TH group, but the performance of CI group on expository texts was lower than in TH students. Reading comprehension of expository texts was related to inhibition and shifting in adolescents with CI.

READING FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSE

The central concepts underlying academic reding and their implications for instruction are outlined as well as the development of reading curricula including the analyses and choosing material and text. Reading teachers need to design content based courses by building coherent and effective reading curricula. So teachers need to set ex- pectations for their students and assist them in achieving them by means of principled and purposeful reading instruction. In academic settings reading instruction is consid- ered to be the important means for learning information and access to explanations. It is also used to carry out language-learning tasks usually with writing activities, though listening and speaking activities may be linked to reading as well. Key words: multiple purpose, to synthesize, integrated skills, bilingual.

Simultaneous training on overlapping grapheme phoneme correspondences augments learning and retention

An important component of learning to read is the acquisition of letter-to-sound- mappings. The sheer quantity of mappings and many exceptions suggests that children may use a form of statistical learning to acquire them. However, while statistical models of reading are item-based, reading instruction typically focuses on rule-based approaches involving small sets of regularities. This discrepancy poses the question of how different groupings of regularities, an unexamined factor of most reading curricula, may impact learning. Exploring the interplay between item statistics and rules, this study investigated how consonant variability, an item-level factor, and the degree of overlap among the to-be-trained vowel strings, a group-level factor, influence learning. First graders (N = 361) were randomly assigned to be trained on vowel sets with high overlap (e.g., EA, AI) or low overlap (EE, AI); this was crossed with a manipulation of consonant frame variability. While high vowel overlap led to poorer initial performance, it resulted in more learning when tested immediately and after a two-week-delay. There was little beneficial effect of consonant variability. These findings suggest that online letter/sound processing impacts how new knowledge is integrated into existing information. Moreover, they suggest that vowel overlap should be considered when designing reading curricula.