This study investigated the effects of assisted oral reading on EFL learners' oral reading rates and took into account repetition times, passage features (length and type), and language proficiency. Forty-nine students from a university of technology took part in a 27-week oral reading program. Teaching assistants were assigned to assist…

A great deal of past research in reading fluency has focused on oral reading fluency in L1, but literature in EFL oral reading and silent reading is still in its infancy. This study attempts to examine the development of silent reading fluency in a speed reading course and aims to determine whether an improvement in silent reading speed…

One of the challenges for the successful implementation of extensive reading (ER) programmes, especially in Asian contexts, stems from curricular factors where class time is often prioritised for tasks requiring the presence of a teacher. This paper investigates the role of extensive reading online (ERO), an alternative approach to traditional ER,…

Students native to the Arabian Gulf region often struggle with reading skills. The purpose of this study was to explore the reading habits and reading culture of Emirati undergraduate students and to investigate the use of a particular reading strategy (Listening While Reading) on undergraduate Emirati students reading rate and comprehension. This…

The present study tested the hypothesis that underlying orthographic representations vary in completeness within the individual, which is manifested in both spelling accuracy and reading speed. Undergraduate students were trained to improve their spelling of difficult words. Word reading speed was then measured for these same words, allowing for a…

Many universities in the Middle East, for instance, Shiraz University in Iran and Sultan Qaboos University in Oman have been running M-reader, a free Internet site which helps educational institutions to manage extensive reading (ER), as a way of including Extensive Reading in ELT classes for years. In spite of few attempts to evaluate this online…

This feasibility study investigated if feedback about individual eye movements, reflecting varying word processing stages, can improve reading performance. Twenty-five university students read 90 newspaper articles during 9 eye-tracking sessions. Training group participants (n = 12) were individually briefed before each session, which eye movement…

This study investigated the efficacy of the Fluency Development Lesson (FDL) in improving reading achievement in primary grade struggling readers. 30 readers, enrolled in a summer reading clinic, participated in daily 40-min mini-reading lessons across 5 weeks. During the fluency lessons, readers practiced and developed their literacy skills…

Research regarding the academic reading load experienced by first year students at universities in South Africa indicated that students are woefully under-prepared to deal with this load as they have limited reading experiences and strategies. This led to the implementation of an academic reading programme at a university of technology. In order…

This article reports on the extensive reading (ER) component of a reading intervention programme to improve first-year students' reading proficiency. To make the intervention more practical and to accelerate improvement, an ER component was included in the programme. Two groups of first-year students (high-risk and low-risk) were required to read…

This paper investigates using data-driven learning (DDL) as a means of stimulating greater lexicogrammatical knowledge and reading speed among lower proficiency learners in an extensive reading program. For 16 weekly 90-minute sessions, an experimental group (12 students) used DDL materials created from a corpus developed from the Oxford Bookworms…

This study investigated the effects of (a) the amount of pleasure reading completed, (b) the type of texts read (i.e., simplified or unsimplified books), and (c) the level of simplified texts read by 14 Japanese university students who made the largest reading rate gains over one academic year. The findings indicated that the participants who made…

Thirteen English as a foreign language students read 26 passages during a 13-week period. Each passage was read five times, and students answered comprehension questions after the first and the fifth reading. Another 13 students read the same number of passages but without repetition and only answered the comprehension questions once. All students…

Reading plays a dominant role among the four skills in foreign language acquisition for college students. Unfortunately, over the past few decades, English teaching practice shows that Chinese students are vulnerable in it. Both their reading speed and their reading skills are far from being satisfactory. Schema theory presents a very efficient…

This paper reports on the use of an English-language reading practice application for an Android tablet computer with students who are not native speakers of English. The application materials for vocabulary learning in reading-passage contexts were created to include words from a database of low-frequency and technical noun-verb collocations…