A cross-sectional study examined the effect of meaning frequency, referred to as ''dominance'' in the semantic priming paradigm, where ambiguous words (primes) were processed in isolation. Participants made lexical decisions to target words that were associates of the more frequent (dominant) or less frequent (subordinate) meaning of a homograph…

This study uses latent transition analysis to examine reading development across the kindergarten and 1st-grade year. Data include poverty status and dichotomous measures of reading at 4 time points for a large sample of children within the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. In each of 4 waves of the study, 5 latent classes were represented in…

Two studies investigated whether knowledge of specific letter-sound correspondences is a necessary precursor of children's ability to isolate phonemes in speech. In both studies, Czech and English children reliably isolated phonemes for which they did not know the corresponding letter. These data refute the idea that phoneme manipulation ability…

Introduction: Stress in Spanish is associated with an orthographic mark that indicates stress, but there are also other clues that point to it. Most words have the same stress (on the penultimate syllable), and closed syllables (syllables ending in a consonant) attract the stress. In this paper we study these clues, and consequently the function…

Neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency were orthogonally varied in two experiments on Italian nonwords. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency on visual lexical decision was found: The presence of one high-frequency neighbor increased response latencies and error rates to nonwords. By contrast, no effect of…

This document sets forth the design of a test of reading comprehension. The exam requires students to read passages of written English text--either literary or informational--and to answer questions about what they have read. In some cases, the questions deal with facts in the text or vocabulary. In other cases, a complete answer requires a clear…

This guide will help teach phonemic awareness to Pre K-3 students. It presents phonemic awareness as a sophisticated branch of phonological awareness through interactive activities that allows the student to succeed in learning the sounds represented by the letters of the alphabet. The book is designed to provide easy-to-follow suggestions for:…

The place of literary criticism in the education of pre-service English language teachers in EFL contexts is rarely discussed in the related literature. Traditional view of teaching criticism involves learning of the tenets of the critical school and applying them to literary texts. In this paper, an application of teaching criticism is discussed…

The study investigated EFL students' ability to comprehend and analyze advertisements and identify their stylistic features. Results of a test with sixty six EFL college students showed lexical and structural features that are easy to identify and those that are difficult to identify. Responses also reflected the difficulty level of the lexical…

This study's aim was to understand the relationship of the component skills of reading, such as word recognition, vocabulary, and spelling, to large-scale measures of literacy, such as the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) (Kirsch, Jungleblut, Jenkins, & Kolstad, 1993) and the closely related International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS)…

This study examined word identification skills between two groups of college students with different first language (L1) backgrounds (Chinese and Korean) learning to read English as a second language (ESL). Word identification skills were tested in a naming experiment and an auditory category judgment task. Both groups of ESL learners demonstrated…

Two dimensions of students' beliefs about meaning construction in reading processes, transmission and transaction beliefs, were studied. According to transmission beliefs, the reader's task is to understand the author's intended meaning, while transaction beliefs assign to the reader the role of active meaning constructor. Students' beliefs were…

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale study which focused on reading strategy instruction for learners of French or Spanish as a modern foreign language. The objective of the study was to explore the potential of reading strategy instruction in raising the learner readers' awareness of reading strategies, in extending the range of…

In the present study, we examined the reading activities of young readers, while reading an expository text. A total of 24 third-graders was administered a think-aloud task on two occasions. Their protocols were analysed by a coding system that captured two levels of the reading process: the word identification level and the reading comprehension…

As an exercise in understanding the cognitive processes underlying reading, second language teacher trainees were asked to read a text and say aloud everything they said to themselves silently. the text used, a rhyme-riddle intended for use with elementary school learners of English as a Second Language, was appropriate for the students, required…