The current study examined the effect of combining a utility value intervention with task relevance instructions on utility value, recall, and reading time. A utility value intervention is an activity that assists students in making relevance connections between course content and their lives, while task relevance instructions are pre-reading cues…

In the present article, we examined the effect of the reading medium and the reading time-frame on text processing, metacognitive monitoring of comprehension, and comprehension outcomes. The eye movements of 116 undergraduates were recorded while they read three texts in print and three texts on a tablet under self-paced reading time or under time…

ReadingPlus, i-Ready, Epic!, Accelerated Reader --digital reading platforms for education (DRPEs) are pervasive in today's literacy classrooms across grade levels and contexts. It is, therefore, crucial that both English language arts (ELA) educators and teacher educators, alike, understand the potential lasting effects DRPEs can have on young…

Few studies have examined the effects of extensive reading (ER) on foreign language learners' acquisition of sight vocabulary, especially for partially known high-frequency words and reading fluency development. This study compared groups of non-English-major Japanese university-level students engaged in ER with intensive reading (IR) for two…

L2 extensive reading (ER) research primarily studies intermediate and upper-intermediate learners, but few studies investigate beginners. This study addresses this gap by reporting on beginner Japanese as Foreign Language (JFL) learners' attempts to do ER according to Waring and McLean's (2015) ER principles. In this study, 13 second-semester…

The issues of whether mobile-assisted English as a foreign language (EFL) reading is effective have become increasingly important for EFL teachers and policy-makers. However, empirical studies investigating EFL students' reading comprehension performance on mobile phones and students' perceptions of these reading formats are lacking. The present…

Reaching a reading goal of 150,000 words in a semester is no easy feat for many language learners. To reach this goal, an extensive reading (ER) program needs to invest in and select a format that can best enable this achievement. This preliminary study compares the use of two different extensive reading (ER) formats that employ two learning…

The coherence threshold marks the point at which a reader has gained a sufficient comprehension level to move on in a text. Previous research has demonstrated that the readers' coherence threshold can be manipulated by increasing or decreasing task demands. The present experiments examined a manipulation of the coherence threshold within the text…

The goal of the present set of experiments was to identify the conditions under which readers evoked prepotent-response inhibition to prevent interference from reactivated misconceptions. In Experiment 1, participants with varying inhibition ability read refutation texts that addressed common misconceptions and control texts. Overall, participants…

Twenty adult ESL students at a community college participated in a semester reading intervention. Participants received a modified extensive reading treatment, and some participants received an additional repeated reading direct instruction reading intervention. The author examined the impact of the reading interventions on ESL students' reading…

Most people want to be able to read their reading materials quicker and remember them effectively. Covering a large quantity of reading materials at a normal speed requires much more time than is usually available. Good readers, however, can cover a lot of materials by identifying key elements of a sentence for key idea with the help of…

This study examined the effects of relevance instructions on English as a foreign language (EFL) readers' text processing and memories. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: the experimental condition, where they read texts to identify a specific category of information, and the control condition, where they read texts…

Reader expectations form across hierarchical scales of discourse (e.g., from coarse to fine: genre, narrative, syntax). Cross-scale interactivity produces word reading times (RTs) with multifractal structure. After introducing multifractals, we test two hypotheses regarding their relevance to reader expectations: (1) multifractal evidence of…

Reading rate, usually measured in words per minute, is a common operationalization of reading fluency in second language (L2) research and pedagogy. However, the impact of word length is often not addressed. This paper presents two studies showing how the number of characters in a text influences L2 reading time, independent of word counts, within…

Two groups of English as a second language students engaged in a fourteen-week repeated reading (RR) treatment: (1) a 3x group (n = 16), which engaged in three readings per session, and (2) a 5x group (n = 15), which engaged in five readings per session. Reading rate and background knowledge were measured at five points to assess the effect of…