This study explored the lexical coverage of corpus-based vocabulary lists (general, academic, and content-specific) across several million tokens gathered from digital science resources (DSR) for middle school (6-8 grade) students in the United States. The goal was to estimate the extent to which a combination of well-known word lists, mostly…

In this article, Charlie Taylor offers a commentary on Yang et al.'s 2021 "Reading in a Foreign Language" article, "Text Difficulty in Extensive Reading: Reading Comprehension and Reading Motivation." In their study, Yang et al. analyzed the effects of text difficulty on the reading comprehension and motivation of high school…

This study investigates the effects of the text difficulty of extensive reading materials on the reading comprehension and reading motivation of English as a foreign language (EFL) vocational high school students in Taiwan. Two experimental groups were assigned, on an individual basis, to read graded readers at either one level below ('i-1') or…

Aka (2019) conducted an year-long large-scale study demonstrating that Japanese high school students who undertook extensive reading performed better than a control group who undertook grammatical instruction. Those showing the greatest gains were those of lower and intermediate proficiency. The students' achievement was measured in terms of…

Intermediate learners of Spanish read a Spanish newspaper article with vocabulary assistance either before reading, while reading, both, or without any such assistance. Reading performance was significantly better for students receiving vocabulary assistance during reading, but not for those receiving it before reading. Reading time of the…