This study aims to relate readability degree with thematic structures, a concept based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The texts chosen were fragments purposively sampled from three popular academic texts written by Pierre Bourdieu (1991) (Text 1), Norman Fairclough (1989) (Text 2), and Bill Ashcroft et al. (2002) (Text 3). The Theme…

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 represents some suggestions towards discourse-analytic approaches for ESL/EFL education, with the focus on identifying the textual forms which can contribute to the textual difficulty. Textual difficulty/comprehensibility, rather than being purely text-based or reader-dependent, is certainly a matter of interaction between text and…