This study reviews the effect of comprehension and perceived text difficulty in promoting reading enjoyment and interest to read more among novice learners practicing extensive and pleasure reading. Sixty-seven college students in their first semester of Spanish were asked to read a children-like story picture book in Spanish and were then given…

Today reading comprehension is considered an essential skill in modern life, therefore, higher education students require more specific skills to understand, interpret and evaluate texts effectively. Short answer questions (SAQs) are one of the relevant and proper tools for assessing reading comprehension skills. Unlike multiple-choice questions,…

Silent reading frequently entails engaging the "inner voice," a phenomenon in which individuals sub-vocally articulate words in their minds. This inner voice is understood to stem from the internalization process, wherein external verbal speech transitions into internal dialogue. However, the mechanisms through which foreign language…

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…

Previous literature has focused on investigating the use of sources in the classroom and how much they contribute to building a coherent mental representation of the texts. These studies explain how integration from multiple document sources occurs; however, their results are limited to the first language and do not inform about the types of these…

This study explores the relationship among student college attainment and the variables mathematical thinking, analytical thinking, language structure, reading comprehension, mathematics result, physics result, written language (Spanish), and English as a foreign language. Method: The participants were 130 students enrolled in an undergraduate…

The purpose of this paper is to gain insights into the strategies employed by beginning learners of Spanish, German, Chinese and Japanese as Foreign Languages at university level in order to comprehend texts in their target languages. It also investigates possible relationships between strategic behaviour and success in reading comprehension…

In the present study we examined whether overlap in language across texts influences the integration of information into a coherent discourse representation for bilingual readers. Across two experiments highly proficient Spanish--English bilinguals read pairs of expository passages describing two fictional science facts while their eye-movements…

Duolingo is a commercial language-teaching platform that offers free courses on the web and on mobile apps. This study reports the ACTFL listening and reading proficiency levels of adult Duolingo learners who had completed beginning-level courses in Spanish or French. The participants (n = 225) were learners residing in the United States, had…

The ratio of women to men is 4 to 1 in beginning university Spanish courses, and this gap widens the higher the level of instruction (Chavez 2001). Prior experiments on reading in Spanish show that the interaction of readers' gender and passage content plays a significant role with learners at the intermediate levels, but not at advanced levels of…

Mobile devices are increasingly promoted as tools to facilitate ubiquitous and individualized learning, allowing learners to work at their own pace in authentic and meaningful settings. However, in the case of second language learning, there is a paucity of apps and tools related to improving students' reading comprehension in both Spanish and…

This study explores the effect of prior discipline-related knowledge in reading comprehension for two groups of students of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL). The first group (G1), had 22 students enrolled in a general Spanish course and the second (G2), had 18 students enrolled in a course of Spanish for medical professions. The aim was to…

Concerns about poor L1 reading skills in undergraduate students have been expressed in several contexts. These skills form a basis for building robust L2 reading comprehension skills, vital for translators. This study, which is part of a larger organization-based action research study to improve L1 reading levels, aimed to explore how L1 reading…

This study identified the reading comprehension strategies that English-speaking college students enrolled in beginner, intermediate, and advanced Spanish language classes at a major Midwestern university in the United States used to comprehend a text in their second language. The findings suggest that readers tended to use the same comprehension…

The objective of this research is to determine the competences of students of Basic Spanish Language II (Let. 012) in the comprehension of the superstructure and macrostructure of expository texts, in two college Campuses; the UASD San Francisco de Macorís Campus, and the UASD Bonao Campus for the semester 2015-2. The theory is based on the…