Estimating the difficulty of reading tests is critical in second language education and assessment. This study was aimed at examining various text features that might influence the difficulty level of a high-stakes reading comprehension test and predict test takers' scores. To this end, the responses provided by 17,900 test takers on the reading…

Though the empirical findings of the past studies in the literature have offered strong support to the significant role of language knowledge and background knowledge in reading comprehension, this issue has not been explored with regard to specific purposes tests in the Iranian higher education context. Therefore, this study aimed at exploring…

A teacher's ability to read effectively is critical to that individual's ability to teach reading skills. Correspondingly, most state departments of education require that prospective teachers earn a passing score on a standardized reading comprehension test before they can enter university-based teacher education programs or otherwise get a…

The strong presence of culturally relevant materials in classrooms is seen as an indicator of good teaching but the development and use of these materials is under-investigated. Similarly, the actual construction and use of culturally relevant materials for literacy assessment purposes is under-reported. This paper examines the development and…

The present study investigates whether textual enhancement had any effects on grammar learning (tag questions) and reading comprehension, and whether the types of tag question contributed to the benefits of textual enhancement. The study employed a pretest--posttest design with three treatment sessions. The target forms were English tag questions,…

This study demonstrates the generalization of previous laboratory results showing the benefits of Self-Explanation Reading Training (SERT) to college students' course exam performance. The participants were 265 students enrolled in an Introductory Biology course, 59 of whom were provided with SERT. The results showed that SERT benefited students…

This study demonstrates the generalization of previous laboratory results showing the benefits of self-explanation reading training (SERT) to college students' course exam performance. The participants were 265 students enrolled in an Introductory Biology course, 59 of whom were provided with SERT training. The results showed that SERT benefited…

Teaching students to enjoy reading is important in middle level education; however, middle school students with emotional behavioral disabilities (EBD) frequently struggle with reading skills and frequently display motivational deficits during reading instruction. The purpose of this study was to examine if the presence/absence of a classroom pet…

The article summarizes the results of the comparative study of Reading comprehension texts used in B2 level tests: Unified (Russia) State Exam in English (EGE) and Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE). The research conducted was mainly focused on six parameters measured with the Coh-Metrix, a computational tool producing indices of the…

This study presents the processes of developing and establishing reliability and validity of a reading test by administering an integrative approach as conventional reliability and validity measures superficially reveals the difficulty of a reading test. In this respect, analysing vocabulary frequency of the test is regarded as a more eligible way…