This study investigated what features undergraduate EFL learners perceive as affecting the difficulty of model paragraphs. Four hundred and seventy-five Vietnamese undergraduates participated in a partial least squares structural equation model design. They ranked five paragraphs from easiest to most difficult and responded to a 10-point Likert…

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 paper reports the effects of the properties of source texts on summarization. One hundred and fifty-seven undergraduates were asked to write summaries of one of three extended English texts of similar length and readability, but differing in other discoursal features such as lexical diversity and macro-organization. The effects of…

A study investigated college students' reactions to a news story written in the traditional "inverted pyramid" format and the same story rearranged into a "mapped" format (where similar information is gathered under heads and subheads). Seventy students were given the story in either the "mapped" or the traditional…

Effects on comprehension of a text structure used primarily in science and mathematics to present principles and associated proofs were studied for 70 undergraduates in 3 experiments. Results suggest that the usual proof-first structure is more difficult than a principle-first structure and results in less complete text representation. (SLD)

The effect of equations in scientific proofs on readers' comprehension was studied. Forty college undergraduates solved unfamiliar physics problems with or without a traditional series of related equations. Verbal proofs produced better responses than did equation-based proofs. Equations in proofs cause readers to shift attention away from…