Besides explicit inference of word meanings, associating words with diverse contexts may be a key mechanism underlying vocabulary learning through reading. Drawing from distributional semantic theory, we developed a text modification method called reflash to facilitate both word-context association and explicit inference. Using a set of left and…

The science of reading (SoR) is a term used for a body of evidence encompassing multi-disciplinary research from education, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. This evidence points to six key constructs that contribute to proficient reading: oral language, phonological awareness including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency,…

This report reflects a panel presentation and discussion at the 2020 Literacy Research Conference focused on the science of reading (SoR). Each panelist presents a summary of the presentation and incorporates the comments of the Literacy Research Association (LRA) members attending the session virtually and posting in the chat room. Each…

Sixty English as a foreign language learners were divided into high-, intermediate-, and low-level groups based on their scores on pretests of target vocabulary and Vocabulary Levels Test scores. The participants read 10 Level 1 and 10 Level 2 graded readers over 37 weeks during two terms. Two sets of 100 target words were chosen from each set of…

The theme for this year's College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa was "Engaged Language Research and Practice," with the plenary speech given by Dr. Kathryn A. Davis. Following a preface from the editors and plenary speaker highlights, contents of these proceedings include: Section I:…

This report describes ongoing research on reading in African languages. It draws mainly on contributions from two British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) "Language in Africa" (LiA) Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings: the LiA SIG strand at BAAL 2013 and the seminar on "Reading Methodologies in African Languages"…

This article presents a case study research with aims to find out which activities, methodological and textual aspects used in a reading strategies course were causing a group of students difficulties when analyzing critically written information. We conducted the study at Universidad de Córdoba (Colombia) with seventh semester students from the…

The outbreak of domestic turmoil in Syria in 2011 forced Syrian people to seek refuge in the neighbouring countries, one of which was Turkey. This situation brought many problems, the primary of which was language. In this sense, teaching Turkish to Syrian students became a necessity. Therefore, conducting research on language skills was seriously…

Language-use strategies are considered potentially effective approaches that learners select to accomplish a second- or foreign-language task. In the past three decades, there has been a proliferation of research concerned with learners' strategy use at different levels of language ability and the influence of L1 learner strategies on L2 language…

I continue here the long-standing discussion on the familiar topic of whether subconscious language acquisition is more powerful than conscious language learning, with a focus on vocabulary, adding recent studies as well as older ones I missed in previous publications on this topic (e.g. Krashen, 2004).

Prompted by the recent shift of attention from just focusing on the top-down processing in L2 reading towards considering the basic component, bottom-up processing, the role of phonological component has also enjoyed popularity among a selected circle of SLA investigators (Koda, 2005). This study investigated the effect of the automatization of…

The purpose of this pilot study was to examine the effects of perceptual learning style preferences on L2 lexical inferencing and whether learners with certain perceptual learning styles benefited more from an explicitly instructional program. Joy Reid's (1995) Perceptual Learning Style Preferences (PLSP) Inventory and a lexical inferencing test…

Modern primary teachers must adapt literacy programmes and ensure efficient learning for all. They must also support children with language and literacy difficulties, children learning English as an additional language and possibly teach a modern foreign language. To do this effectively, they need to understand the applied linguistics research…

Irish has significant State support, but lacks a research base to support the teaching of Irish reading. Current approaches to teaching Irish reading are presented, and outcomes summarised. Issues of consistency and complexity in Irish orthography are discussed in light of an analysis of a corpus of early reader texts, and the formulation of rules…

Repeated reading, a procedure involving repetition of the same text, has received copious attention from first language reading research providing highly converging evidence of its potency for reading fluency, accuracy, and comprehension. In contrast, second language research on repeated reading has been scarce. The very few studies extant have,…