Research indicates that readers break down complex words into their smallest, meaning-based units (morphemes) when spelling (e.g., Senechal, 2000). However, it remains unclear how morphemes are formed and whether newly formed morphological knowledge (i.e., knowledge of morphemes) is strong enough to support word learning. The current research…

This essay proposes a series of "threshold concepts" for literary studies: "text", "meaning", "context", "form", and "reading". Each term carries both commonsense understandings and disciplinary understandings, which differ from each other drastically. The disciplinary understandings…

Extensive reading is one of a range of activities that can be used in a language learning course. Ideally, the choice of activities to go into a course should be guided by principles which are well supported by research. Similarly, the way each of those activities is used should be guided by well-justified principles. In this article, we look at…

The purpose of this study is to investigate how ten advanced Taiwanese English as a Foreign Language college students comprehend and interpret two English short stories--"The Discus Thrower" and "A Passage to India." Two types of data were gathered for this study: verbal self-reporting and post-reading responses. Oral…