This study examines the role of receptive vocabulary knowledge on outcomes of the TOEFL reading comprehension task. Participants included 18 native speakers of Spanish learning English as a foreign language and 17 native speakers of English ranging in age from 19-25 years. Lexical stimuli were presented auditorily and were divided into…

This study explores the role of glosses and working memory capacity (WM) in second language (L2) learners' recall and comprehension in electronic reading. Glosses were investigated in terms of the type of information they provided (lexical versus topic-level) and their location on the screen (pop-up window versus separate window). One…

Instructional models for foreign language reading and listening comprehension are outlined and synthesized, and an instructional procedure based on immediate recall, a standardized method for assessing first-language comprehension, is proposed. First, the interrelated processes of reading and listening comprehension, as currently defined in the…

In the two major sections of this paper the influence of John B. Carroll and Robert Lado on the teaching and testing of listening comprehension since 1961 is examined. The first section reviews the literature of that field and outlines four major periods roughly corresponding to the methodological orientation dominating professional thinking at…