Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not…

Although there is considerable research on and knowledge about students' conceptualizations of learning or academic practices and skills, the variability of these conceptualizations has been consistently neglected. In the present study, we address this variability in the field of academic reading with the help of a novel approach. Drawing on…

This study reports on a self-paced reading experiment exploring whether the figurativeness of collocations affects L2 processing of collocations. The participants were 40 English native speakers and 44 Chinese-speaking English foreign language learners (including doctoral, postgraduate, and undergraduate students). To ensure that the effect…

Reading involves both cognitive and psychological activities of combining both pre-existing cultural and linguistic knowledge. The reader has the ability to view the world in the light of his/her own cultural experiences which are constructed consciously or unconsciously, and may seem to be fruitful in text analysis and exploring the uncovered…

We propose a previously unexamined factor instrumental in learning vocabulary accounting for the differences between learning a native and a foreign language: the development of critical thinking in adolescence. We hypothesize that the difficulties experienced in foreign vocabulary development result from the learner's readiness to question new…

Lexical inferencing is considered a listening strategy that is commonly employed by advanced EFL (English as a Foreign Language) listeners and a factor that contributes to successful listening comprehension. However, investigations of the factors that influence inferencing success in listening as well as how much each factor contributes to success…

In order for a person to comprehend metaphoric expressions, do metaphor-irrelevant aspects of literal information need to be inhibited? Previous research using sentence-verification paradigms has found that literal associates take longer to process after reading metaphorical sentences; however, it is problematic to infer inhibition from this…

Undergraduates of the University of Economics in Bratislava need to receive decent economic and legal education to be able to work successfully in different areas of the national economy and in the management structures of all levels. The previous research has shown that Slovakia follows a significant negative trend with performance in reading.…

Previous research has furnished evidence that alliterative expressions (e.g. "a slippery slope") are comparatively memorable for second language learners, at least when these expressions are attended to as decontextualized items (Lindstromberg and Boers, 2008a; Boers et al., 2012). The present study investigates whether alliteration…

The present article examines the outcomes derived from a task on intensive reading carried out by university students. The main goal is to analyze the frequency of use and the success of idiom solving strategies used by the subjects while reading. Additionally, our interest is to compare the above outcomes and the reading time scores of a group of…

Teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates can be difficult under the best of circumstances. The densely figurative language can be very difficult to sift through for students unfamiliar with anything but naturalistic speech. When this is further compounded by the students' resistance to reading anything longer than several paragraphs, teachers find…