Las tribulaciones.

3.1.5.1 Morpho-syntactic Proficiency and Vocabulary

Academic reading ability depends heavily on general language proficiency and

vocabulary size, which is developed alongside academic literacy with many multilingual students and scholars (Laufer & Nation, 1999). English proficiency would have ideally been gathered using reported performance on a proficiency test such as IELTS or TOEFL, but due to the diversity of the participant sample, not all participants had a recent comparable proficiency score or had access to their score. Instead, a brief 18-item gap-fill test targeting morpho-grammatical knowledge and vocabulary size was administered as a language proficiency test. This test

involved deleting the second half of target words in otherwise coherent sentences to create a gap- fill task. The test is based on the productive orthographic vocabulary size tests (Laufer & Nation, 1999) which have been found to strongly predict reading comprehension in a second language (Cheng & Matthews, 2018). Specifically words from the 6000 to 8000 most frequent words in COCA Academic (Davies, 2008) needed for academic reading at the university level (Crossley et al., 2016; Kyle & Crossley, 2015), were targeted in a gap-fill task with a set of 18 sentences which contain target words (Appendix B). The words which were targeted involved a range of inflectional and derivational morphological endings to also tap into grammatical knowledge in addition to vocabulary size. Scoring was done using an answer key. Correct answers were marked for 1 point, and answers which did not maintain the intended meaning were marked as 0

points. Item left blank were marked as 0. Answers which matched the key semantically but had incorrect inflection or part-of-speech marking were given a half point (.5). Each participant received a score out of 18. Reliability statistics were calculated for the morphosyntactic proficiency test in the following chapter.

3.1.5.2 Reading and Typing Speed

Reading fluency is an important lower-order literacy skill (Gauvin & Hulstijn, 2010; W. Grabe, 2009; Stoller et al., 2013), and should be measured and controlled for in any study of higher-order reading processes. Additionally, reading fluency has been found to exhibit effects on eye-tracking measures in monolingual data (Taylor & Perfetti, 2016). Reading fluency was thus measured by words per minute read during a silent reading of a 375-word 12th grade-level

academic text about volcanoes (not one of the texts included in the main procedure). This text was followed by four comprehension questions just to ensure the participants read intentionally; however, this was not figured into calculations as a measure of comprehension.

Although the way in which tasks are scored is intended to mitigate the influence of productive skills, production fluency remains connected to comprehension through the broader construct of literacy (Belcher & Hirvela, 2001). Due to the productive aspect of the cloze and summary tasks, a measure of L2 writing ability is warranted, but was impractical given the time demands placed on the participants. In lieu of a comprehensive measure of L2 writing

proficiency, typing speed was gathered as a measure of production fluency. The fluency with which participants produce responses may also affect their performance (Barkaoui, 2014). As such, a measure of typing speed was included as a baseline individual difference. Participants were asked to type as many words as possible in 60 seconds. The words to type were randomly selected words which appeared on the computer screen. Participants were given real-time

feedback as they typed regarding whether a word was typed correctly and when the word was completed. The typing speed test was taken from the free typing speed test at livechat.com (LiveChat, 2016).

3.1.5.3 Reading Motivation

Because this study focuses on reading comprehension tasks as purposeful, an important factor in measuring academic reading comprehension is motivation for reading. Motivation for reading has been found to contribute to reading comprehension skills in previous research (Schaffner & Schiefele, 2013; Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997). A reading motivation survey was administered to participants before the reading trials and consisted of a brief discrete-point item survey, using a 5-point Likert scale, regarding reading motivation. This survey, developed for this study, included 10 items measuring intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation (five each). Intrinsic reading motivation refers to internal or personal reasons for reading where reading is a means to its own end (enjoyment, personal enrichment), and extrinsic reading motivation refers to external or practical reasons for reading where reading is a means to some other end (career- usefulness of reading, social engagement through reading). The items were subjective agreement items (e.g. “I enjoy reading about topics which I have discussed with others.”). These items were derived from previous surveys of motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000; Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997), with some reductions made for the sake of practicality. The survey was validated using

confirmatory factor analysis to ensure that the items targeting the different motivational constructs factored together. These results are presented in the following chapter. The survey instrument is presented in Appendix C.

3.1.5.4 Reasoning

Inductive reasoning ability has been found to predict reading comprehension in previous research (Klauer & Phye, 2008). Specifically, inductive reasoning refers to one’s ability to extrapolate information beyond what is presented, and to notice patterns and regularities. This ability to draw conclusions from observations has been shown to be related to inference-

generation skill (Schaffner & Schiefele, 2013). For this study, inductive reasoning was measured using an incomplete series test (123test, n.d.), where the first three items of a patterned sequence of shapes were presented, and participants filled in the fourth item in the sequence from four options (See Figure 3.1.2 for an example). The test consisted of ten dichotomously scored items. Reliability for the test was calculated using Cronbach’s Alpha, and these results are presented in the following chapter. The test took approximately five minutes to complete and was

administered via computer using a web browser. As the focus of the current study is on the contribution of inference making to reading comprehension, inductive reasoning scores were included as a control variable in models of comprehension score.

Figure 3.1.2 Example of an incomplete series test item using dot patterns in matrices.

Note: The intended answer in this case is identical to the second member of the series.

3.2.5.5 Working Memory ・ _・ ・ ・ ・ _・ ・ ・ ・ _・ ・ ・

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Working memory capacity is an important cognitive ability to measure in the current study because it has been found to contribute to reading comprehension and inference-making ability in monolingual readers (Cain et al., 2001; Calvo, 2005; Carretti et al., 2009) and

multilingual readers (Alptekin & Erçetin, 2010; Erçetin & Alptekin, 2013; Joh & Plakans, 2017; Lipka & Siegel, 2012). Since the SVT for inferencing was administered after text reading, working memory capacity is a potential moderator when comparing SVT data to comprehension data. Working memory was measured using a 2-back test. Although n-back tests are contentious as measures of working memory capacity (Jaeggi et al, 2010), there is evidence to suggest that they work as a measure of working memory in adults (Haaveit et al, 2010; Tsai, 2014) and visual memory capacity (Gajewski et al, 2018), which is appropriate for the current study focused on reading.

In the 2-back test, participants were shown a series of simple images. At each image, participants compared the current image to the image they saw two images previously. They indicated through mouse click whenever the current image matched the image shown two images previously. They saw a total of 35 images, with each image presented for one second. 15 2-back matches were randomly distributed in the sequence of pictures. Scores were reported as a percentage of correct responses to total images shown minus 2. Reliability is presented in the following chapter.