Since its emergence, generative AI has significantly impacted various fields, including English language education. Numerous academic studies have investigated its capabilities in grammar correction, writing evaluation, and dynamics of user interaction. However, there have been insufficient investigations into whether texts generated by such AI…

The present study examines the ways Chinese high school EFL learners organize information in their writing. A class of 50 students at grade 9 from a local high school in Guangzhou, China, were recruited as participants. The students' writing at grade 9 was collected as a corpus, comprising ten writing tasks from different text types. In order to…

In the present study we examined whether overlap in language across texts influences the integration of information into a coherent discourse representation for bilingual readers. Across two experiments highly proficient Spanish--English bilinguals read pairs of expository passages describing two fictional science facts while their eye-movements…

In order to further validate and extend the application of recent knowledge structure (KS) measures to second language settings, this investigation explores how second language (L2, English) situation models are influenced by first language (L1, Korean) translation tasks. Fifty Korean low proficient English language learners were asked to read an…

The current study examined the effects of text-based relational (i.e., cohesion), propositional-specific (i.e., lexical), and syntactic features in a source text on subsequent integration of the source text in spoken responses. It further investigated the effects of word integration on human ratings of speaking performance while taking into…

This study aims to understand how EFL learners in different reading proficiency levels comprehend L2 texts, using five-component skills involving measures of (1) vocabulary knowledge, (2) drawing inferences and predictions, (3) knowledge of text structure and discourse organization, (4) identifying the main idea and summarizing skills, and (5)…

Purpose: Research has shown that university students, particularly non-native speakers of English, encounter difficulties with various academic text-types and often lack the ability to organise the information in a structure considered effective by the discourse community or to use the significant language features of the text-type effectively to…

Texts are routinely simplified to make them more comprehensible for second language learners. However, the effects of simplification upon the linguistic features of texts remain largely unexplored. Here we examine the effects of one type of text simplification: intuitive text simplification. We use the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, to examine…

Rhetorical structure refers to a complex network of relationships and the way the underlying ideas are organized within a text. This study was conducted to see whether explicit instruction of descriptive and causative text organization positively affected L3 reading recall. 240 Turkish students of EFL who had Persian as their second language were…

The role of grammatical knowledge in inferencing word meaning has not received proper attention in L2 research. Addressing this issue, the present paper provides research-based and introspective think-aloud data to examine the contribution of grammatical knowledge to inferencing the meaning of unknown words. It addresses (a) the effects of…

Two notions from cognitive psychology were examined in relation to the transfer of reading comprehension skills from L1 to L2: (1) the notion that reading comprehension proceeds by the comprehender's building of a mental structure representing the text and (2) the notion of working memory. Two groups of French learners of English (at…

A study investigated the disparity between the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) competence of South African black children and the competence required to comprehend content subject textbooks. Two ESL schemes and two fifth-year general science textbooks were analyzed for differences in vocabulary, syntax, speech acts, cohesion and coherence.…