The study examined whether individual differences in high school first language (L1) reading achievement and print exposure would account for unique variance in second language (L2) written (word decoding, spelling, writing, reading comprehension) and oral (listening/speaking) proficiency after adjusting for the effects of early L1 literacy and…

This quasi-experimental study reports on a 10-month classroom-based longitudinal investigation, exploring the potential of authentic materials to develop Japanese learners' communicative competence in English. Sixty-two second-year university students were assigned to either a control group receiving textbook input or an experimental group…

In this article we provide an explanation for 2 syntactic phenomena whose systematic production has been observed in the English nonnative grammar of 3 different age groups of 58 bilingual (Basque/Spanish) children after 4 years of exposure to English in a formal setting: (a) insertion of "is" before a lexical verb and (b) insertion of a…

The ultimate goal of reading is to construct text meaning based on visually encoded information. Essentially, it entails converting print into language and then to the message intended by the author. It is hardly accidental, therefore, that, in all languages, reading builds on oral language competence and that learning to read uniformly requires…

Discusses a study of grades six, eight, and ten students in the Netherlands to whom grade-appropriate measures of reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge were administered in their native language, Dutch, as well as in English. The aim was to explore relative contributions to native language and foreign language reading comprehension of a…