Despite the preponderance of research on extensive reading (ER), the research field still suffers from a lack of common understanding of what ER is and how it should be implemented. From the perspective of Day and Bamford's (2002) seminal ten principles for teaching ER, the present methodological synthesis aimed to systematically review and…

This study examines the difficulty shown by Spanish-speaking university students in decoding pre-modified noun phrases (NPs) in English. NPs carry a heavy lexical and conceptual load and foreign language (L2) readers may be challenged by first language (L1) crosslinguistic influence triggered by cognate NPs. Therefore, this study also attempts to…

The Spanish writing system has consistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPC), rendering it more transparent than English. We compared first-language (L1) orthographic transparency on how monolingual English- and Spanish-readers learned a novel writing system with a 1:1 (LT) and a 1:2 (LO) GPC. Our dependent variables were learning time,…

With 97 learners in an advanced Spanish course, the study examines the effects of textual enhancement adjuncts, prior subject knowledge, first language (L1) reading ability, and second language (L2) Spanish proficiency on L2 comprehension of scientific passages. Readings included two texts with two types of embedded questions: a pause or written…