This study examined the effects of relevance instructions on English as a foreign language (EFL) readers' text processing and memories. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: the experimental condition, where they read texts to identify a specific category of information, and the control condition, where they read texts…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

This study reports the perceptions and understanding of extensive reading (ER) of 259 ER practitioners in Japan, Thailand, Mongolia, and Vietnam. The majority of participants understood the core principles of ER, namely (a) the fluent reading of (b) a lot of (c) easy texts. However, about 25% of the participants in Thailand, Mongolia, and Vietnam…

Despite empirical evidence from research showing that the use of text-picture combination is beneficial for second language (L2) learning, little is known about the effectiveness of reading comic books for incidental vocabulary acquisition. This study investigated the effects of engaging with comic books on incidental learning of L2 Italian…

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 paper reports a study of the reading strategies used by twelve Arabic-speaking undergraduates at a major Gulf university when reading texts in English. The procedure employed was a think-aloud protocol followed by a semi-structured interview. Three research questions were addressed: (a) What are the primary comprehension problems encountered…

This study used many-faceted Rasch measurement to investigate the difficulty of graded readers using a 3-item survey. Book difficulty was compared with Kyoto Level, Yomiyasusa Level, Lexile Level, book length, mean sentence length, and mean word frequency. Word frequency and Kyoto Level were found to be ineffective in predicting students'…

This study uses a moving windows self-paced reading task to assess text comprehension of beginning and intermediate-level simplified texts and authentic texts by L2 learners engaged in a text-retelling task. Linear mixed effects (LME) models revealed statistically significant main effects for reading proficiency and text level on the number of…

Standards of coherence are one of the major factors that influence reading comprehension. This study investigated the standards of coherence that second language (L2) learners employ when reading. In a pair of experiments, Japanese learners of English read two-sentence texts with varying causal and semantic relatedness between sentences and then…

This study investigated the effects of (a) the amount of pleasure reading completed, (b) the type of texts read (i.e., simplified or unsimplified books), and (c) the level of simplified texts read by 14 Japanese university students who made the largest reading rate gains over one academic year. The findings indicated that the participants who made…