A rich home literacy environment (HLE) fosters students’ academic achievement. However, the link between HLE and children’s reading comprehension is unclear. This study examined the effects of HLE factors on children’s reading comprehension through a meta-analysis of 59 studies conducted between 1998 and 2018. Results of the meta-analysis indicated three main findings. First, the overall positive correlation between HLE and children’s reading comprehension was moderate (z = .32). Second, sampling area, type of home literacy resource and parental involvement styles did not show a significant interaction effect between each HLE factor and children’s reading comprehension. Third, parents’ involvement and literacy expectations of children had a significantly higher correlation with children’s reading comprehension than home literacy resources did. Findings of this study suggest that parental literacy activities involvement and parental literacy expectations contribute more to children's literacy knowledge enhancement.

Metalinguistic knowledge has a facilitative effect on reading comprehension. This meta-analysis examined the relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and reading comprehension among Chinese students. By focusing on both Chinese and English scripts' reading comprehension performance, this study synthesized 46 studies with 73 independent samples that represented 10,793 Chinese students from primary school to university levels. We found that in both Chinese and English scripts' reading, morphological awareness had the strongest correlation with reading comprehension, whereas both phonological awareness and orthographical skill had a similar medium correlation with reading comprehension. All three metalinguistic knowledge, which was not significantly influenced by the selected moderators of grade group, area, language type, and assessment, had an independent correlation with reading comprehension. The results suggested that reading stages did not significantly impact the function of metalinguistic knowledge on both Chinese and English scripts' reading comprehension for Chinese students. In addition, for Chinese students, morphological awareness plays a more important role than phonological awareness and orthographical skill in both Chinese and English scripts' reading comprehension.

Appropriate learning styles enhance the academic performance of students. This research compares and contrasts the popular effect of teacher-student double centered learning style (TSDCLS) and student-centered learning style (SCLS) on one’s reading, including reading comprehension, inference, main idea abstraction, and reading anxiety. One hundred and fifty one students in grade 4 from three groups (two experimental groups and one control group) participated in the experiment with 18 weeks’ reading comprehension training. The results showed that, first, both learning styles contributed to students’ reading comprehension, inference, main idea abstraction, and reading anxiety. Second, the TSDCLS contributed more to reading anxiety, and the SCLS contributed more to reading comprehension. Both learning styles had similar effects on inference and main idea abstraction. From the correlation test, excluding the correlation between SCLS and reading anxiety which was not significant, all other effects were significant. These findings are discussed along with implications and ideas for future research.

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Students prefer to listen to music while reading because they believe it will help them focus on constructing a contextual mental picture. However, the effect of background music on the reading comprehension of primary school new readers remains unclear. This study examines the effects of two musical factors (familiarity and tempo) on the construction of poetry mental picture in 129 Chinese primary school readers with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. The study controlled for nonverbal intelligence, age, gender, working memory, and receptive vocabulary, and results showed that background music had a negative effect on poetry reading performance. Specifically, students had similar performance in easy poetry reading with background music but performed better in difficult poetry reading with unfamiliar music and slower melody. The effect size of unfamiliar background music was larger than that of melody tempo. This study provided literature on the effect of background music on surface decoding in poetry reading and suggested that the appropriate approach for readers who are in the learning to read stage should be to refrain from listening to music while reading.