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…

The TOEFL was taken by 159 non-native speakers of English in Tehran, Iran, who also took a cloze test and two dictations. Results revealed that Listening Comprehension, cloze and dictation were more highly correlated with each other, and with the remaining parts of the TOEFL, than the latter were with each other. (Author/KM)

Although programs for teaching and testing of English as a second language (ESL) are often evaluated for their attention to communicative competence, there is no consensus on the nature of the communicative competence construct(s) and little empirical support for the various explanatory models. The theoretical literature related to communicative…