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…

Macalister and Webb (2019) claim that "children's literature" written for native English speakers is too difficult for intermediate English as a Second Language (ESL) students, those who have acquired the first 3,000 to 4,000 most commonly used words in English. The authors analyzed a corpus of short stories written for a classroom…

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…

Nobuko Sakurai (2015) presents insightful research results that help educators better understand the impact of translation as it limits reading quantity, reading comprehension, and reading rate in an extensive reading (ER) program. Overall, the results of the study encourage educators to restrict translation as a means of obtaining better results…

Thomas Cobb's 2007 applied linguistics paper, "Computing the Vocabulary Demands of L2 Reading" dealt with whether reading alone can build an adequate reading lexicon in a second language, or whether some sort of extra vocabulary training will normally be required. In the article, Cobb proposed that in the case of adult academic ESL…

In his 2016 article, "What Can Readers Read after Graded Readers?" (EJ1098660), Jeff McQuillan provided data to show that there is an adequate amount of reading material that can be read at or above 98% vocabulary coverage to provide sufficient input to acquire most of the word families from the 2,000- to the 9,000-word-family levels.…

In this response to Sakurai, Meredith Stephens agrees that Sakurai (2015) raises an important issue of which native English speaking teachers may be unaware; Japanese learners of English typically translate into Japanese while reading English. Sakurai explained, "It is speculated that Japanese students naturally translate English into…

The paper "The influence of translation on reading amount, proficiency, and speed in extensive reading" (Sakurai, 2015) outlined the first six years of the official English education system and policy in Japan. It then discussed the efficacy of extensive reading (ER) followed by a distinction between reading and translation. Previous…

Stuart McLean refers in this commentary to Jeffrey Huffman's article "Reading Rate Gains during a One-Semester Extensive Reading Course" (v26 n2 p17-33 Oct 2014) [See: EJ1044344], in which Huffman reports that extensive reading (ER) was an effective way to provide large amounts of comprehensible input to foreign language learners, but…

In his critique of the Huffman (2014) article, McLean (2016) undertakes an important reflective exercise that is too often missing in the field of second language acquisition and in the social sciences in general: questioning whether the claims made by researchers are warranted by their results. In this article, Jeffrey Huffman says that McLean…

This special issue is dedicated to understanding how to best support positive educational outcomes for all students. While reading strategies, course design and methods, testing and assessment, and a variety of other factors are all integral to L2 reading outcomes, policies constructed at the federal, state, district, and school level play an…

In this article, the author considers some of the issues addressed in the 2007 MLA report. The 2007 MLA report argues that the two-tiered literature/language configuration in post-secondary foreign language departments "has outlived its usefulness and needs to evolve," and even needs to be replaced. When proclamations are made that foreign…

In this article, the author critiques the MLA Report. His first response to the MLA report is that it clearly identifies a number of the problems facing modern languages departments today. Enrollments and majors are declining in most modern languages departments throughout the U.S. Other academic departments do not strongly enforce language…

Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren wisely remind in "How to Read a Book" (1972) that readers must come to terms with an author "before" beginning the interpretation process. Following this logic, the first question that should be posed about "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" by MLA Ad Hoc Committee on…

One powerful entry into the new world that is available to language educators is the use of collaboration. Collaboration is defined as: "a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals--for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature--by sharing knowledge,…