The research aimed to develop the reading process and comprehension through extensive reading of 30 English major freshmen students conducted at Lampang Rajabhat University, Thailand, in the academic year of 2018. Data was collected by using pre-and post-test. Several follow-up activities and guidelines, including formative and summative…

The present study investigated the effects of 2 forms of text-based second language (L2) vocabulary glosses, namely dynamic and nondynamic glosses on EFL learners' vocabulary knowledge. Dynamic glosses were operationalized as a set of incrementally ordered mediating annotations designed to help learners identify the correct word definition while…

Quantifying the decoding difficulty (i.e., 'decodability') of text is important for accurately matching young readers to appropriate text and scaffolding reading development. Since no easily accessible, quantitative, word-level metric of decodability exists, we developed a decoding measure (DM) that can be calculated via a web-based scoring…

Australian students come from a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds with each context providing unique challenges. Tensions however exist between the intentions to address diversity and the competing influence of a high-stakes context that prioritizes monolingual classroom practices and diminishes teachers' use of engaging pedagogy.…

The schwa sound, as the most frequent in English, is a near constant in words of three syllables or longer in academic texts. As linguistic research has shown, it characteristically recurs in rhythmic alternation with stressed syllables, contributing to a word's distinctive sound shape. The location of strong stress and therefore schwa is often…

In this study, we used eye-tracking methodology for deeper understanding of the refutation text effect on online text comprehension. A refutation text acknowledges the reader's alternative conceptions about a phenomenon, refutes them and presents the correct conceptions. We tested two hypotheses about its facilitation effect: the coherence…

This paper firstly presents and examines the pedagogical intervention called Processing Instruction (PI). Secondly, it reviews and discusses the main findings of the empirical research conducted to measure the relative effects of PI. Current research trends within the PI research framework will be outlined. Experimental research investigating the…

This forum article discusses using disciplinary literacy approaches for reading literary text targeting interpretation as a goal. Disciplinary literacy approaches make the assumption that literacy tasks and processes differ based upon the demands, goals, and epistemology of each discipline and that identifying these differences is key toward…

Prior research suggests that viewing still images and iconic gestures depicting concepts facilitates the learning of concrete words in the initial stages of second language (L2) acquisition. To date, however, the effect of viewing iconic gestures and images hasn't been systematically compared to the effect of glosses in the learning and retrieval…

Despite the importance of literacy in today's educational curriculum, learning to read is a challenge for many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One of the foundational skills of early literacy learning is the ability to recognize sight words. This study used a single-subject, multiple-probe, across-participants design, to investigate…

In surveys and semi-structured interviews, Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) discussed the role of reading in their first-year composition (FYC) courses infused with 'writing about writing' and 'teaching for transfer' perspectives. Three transformative reading lenses played a pivotal role in instructors' pedagogies -- deconstructing genres,…

How people learn to read is an interesting question which has been investigated by many studies with various approaches. Some recent studies have related learning to read with domain-general abilities and have found a positive relationship between statistical learning and learning to read, as well as between procedural learning and learning to…

Previous research has suggested that Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) can index form-, meaning-, and use-related aspects of the second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge, through, respectively, a lexical decision task (LDT, targeting N400), a semantic relatedness task (SEMREL, targeting N400), and a grammatical judgment task (GJT, targeting…

Although English and German are both Germanic languages, due to various historical changes, many of their cognates are no longer easily recognizable. This study examined whether knowledge of language history can be beneficial to learners when learning English-German cognates. Thirty-five English-speaking second language (L2) learners of…

Second language (L2) learners comprehend more when they are prepared for novel vocabulary that they encounter in a text. Input-based incremental (IBI) vocabulary instruction (Barcroft, 2012) provides L2 instructors and learners with a means of achieving this goal by (a) presenting optimal input to learners at the right time during a…