This study examined whether the assessment of executive function (EF) added a unique contribution to second language (L2) reading comprehension in children in French immersion. Participants were 8- to 9-year old children who completed a collection of measures assessing French reading (i.e., word reading, decoding, and reading comprehension ) and…

World language teachers have historically relied on the notion of teaching methods to inform elements of design and procedure in their instructional practice. Teacher beliefs about teaching methods, however, have been shown to be significantly influenced by their context, including their institution and their learners. This phenomenon has led some…

Past work has suggested that L1 readers retrieve idioms (i.e., "spill the tea") directly vs. matched literal controls ("drink the tea") following unbiased contexts, whereas L2 readers process idioms more compositionally. However, it is unclear whether this occurs when a figuratively or literally biased context…

Despite the preponderance of research on extensive reading (ER), the research field still suffers from a lack of common understanding of what ER is and how it should be implemented. From the perspective of Day and Bamford's (2002) seminal ten principles for teaching ER, the present methodological synthesis aimed to systematically review and…

Recent scholarship in multiliteracies-oriented pedagogies has advocated for greater attention to fostering 'textual thinking', understood as forms of literacy that consider the complexities of semiotic choices made by authors, and their underlying meanings, rhetorical purposes, and cultural contexts. This kind of engagement with texts calls upon…

The aim of this project was to identify factors contributing to cross-language semantic preview benefits. In Experiment 1, Russian-English bilinguals read English sentences with Russian words presented as parafoveal previews. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was used to present sentences. Critical previews were cognate translations of the…

An important question within psycholinguistics is how knowledge of multiple languages impacts the coactivation of word forms and meanings during language comprehension. To the extent that a bilingual's known languages are always partially active, as predicted by models such as the bilingual interactive activation plus model (Dijkstra & Van…

This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in English-French bilinguals, considering both the potential for a direct relation, as well as an indirect one, through word reading. Participants were 146 first-grade students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canada. While the children…

Previous studies have yielded contradictory results on the relationship between perception and production in second language (L2) phonological processing. We re-examine the relationship between the two modalities both within and across processing levels, addressing several issues regarding methodology and statistical analyses. We focus on the…

Many studies have explored the second language (L2) acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and whether L2 speakers transfer a resumptive strategy from first language (L1) to L2. While evidence seems to suggest that there are significant L1-L2 differences in the processing of RCs, relatively little is known about the source of non-target-like L2…

The act of reading is a complex process in which learners rush their cognitive and metacognitive skills to function. The effective use of metacognitive skills is regarded as an important feature becoming prominent in successful reading. In order to exercise reading strategies effectively, students are required to have developed metacognitive…

Previous research has suggested that Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) can index form-, meaning-, and use-related aspects of the second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge, through, respectively, a lexical decision task (LDT, targeting N400), a semantic relatedness task (SEMREL, targeting N400), and a grammatical judgment task (GJT, targeting…

We propose to use reading time as a metric to report progress in language learning applications. As a case study we use a web-based application that enables learners of a foreign language to read texts from the web and practice vocabulary with interactive exercises generated based on their past readings. The application captures generic…

Our aim here is to investigate reading in a foreign language from a multilingual perspective. Much research has focused on first- and second-language reading, especially the important role played by strategy deployment in helping readers to make meaning from texts in different languages. Less emphasis has been placed, however, on how bilinguals…

Reading comprehension performance is predicted by decoding skill and linguistic comprehension (e.g., Hoover & Gough, 1990; Joshi & Aaron, 2012; Scarborough, 2001). However, the type of strategies that readers recruit to build a discourse should also contribute to success in first and second language reading comprehension. Sixty-six French…