Academic reading in English requires processing of challenging advanced texts for comprehension. Highly proficient second language (L2) readers, such as graduate students, are expected to interpret complex texts fluently and efficiently for academic success, yet the field has little evidence on how these readers process texts. Through two…

Readers should construct a coherent discourse during reading comprehension. The ability to build coherence has been examined using coherence and cohesion judgment tasks. Although eye-tracking studies have been conducted on building coherence or processing cohesion among native language users, few such studies have been conducted with second…

The research genre has specific communicative purposes which require students to understand the tone, generic and disciplinary conventions. The present study explored the potential of thematic progression (TP) to contribute to research argument readability. TP concerns how clauses encode information and how that information is carried forward.…

Coherent writing skill is an important prerequisite for academic success, especially at the tertiary level. This work studied the effect of four-month teaching intervention of genre pedagogy with Reading to Learn (R2L) approach for developing coherence in argumentative writing. It was implemented on 40 undergraduate Pakistani English Language…

Researchers have found numerous differences in the approaches raters take to the complex task of essay rating including differences when rating native (L1) and non-native (L2) English writing. Yet less is known about raters' reading practices while scoring those essays. This small-scale study uses eye-tracking technology and reflective protocols…

Standards of coherence are one of the major factors that influence reading comprehension. This study investigated the standards of coherence that second language (L2) learners employ when reading. In a pair of experiments, Japanese learners of English read two-sentence texts with varying causal and semantic relatedness between sentences and then…

Describes research in which a group of proficient speakers of a second language were tested in their ability to identify individual words taken from spoken discourse in both their native language and their second language. Results show that, on the average, they were more proficient in identifying words in their second rather than their first…