This article uses a review of research to consider a fundamental aspect of reading instruction that has been marginalized in policies and practices over the last decade: the development of silent reading habits that involve strong comprehension and optimal reading rates. The review of research attends to typical development and performances of…

The present study addressed the role of speed as a factor in tests of second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge, presupposing that speed of performance is important in actual language use. Research questions were: (a) Do learners with a larger vocabulary size answer faster on an L2 vocabulary breadth test than smaller vocabulary sized learners?;…

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…

Extensive reading is reading as much as possible, for one's own pleasure, at a difficulty level at which one can read smoothly and quickly. In the domain of reading, this paper investigates the effect of extensive reading from e-books, through utilizing a number of downloadable reading application programs on the students' e-devices, as opposed to…

Three questions regarding adult readers' processing of generalization inferences (conceptually broad statements that subsume several specific statements) are investigated. College students (N=193) read expository texts containing target statements that were consistent, inconsistent, or off-topic in relation to a generalization implied by one…

This study investigated the reading strategies used by adult learners' to read materials in English language for their studies. The population of the study consisted of students of Universiti Sains Malaysia. A sample of 80 (40 Postgraduates and 40 Undergraduates) TESOL students enrolled in the University were selected randomly. The data were…

Speed of processing (SOP) is a crucial factor in fluent reading and is measured using reading rate. This measure is commonly used to examine correct reading patterns, yet in the present study it is employed to determine whether differences in SOP exist for correct and incorrect reading. One of the characteristics of dyslexia is slow and inaccurate…

This paper attempts to demonstrate the differences in writing between International English Language Testing System (IELTS) bands 6.0, 6.5 and 7.0. An analysis of exemplars provided from the IELTS test makers reveals that IELTS 6.0, 6.5 and 7.0 writers can make a minimum of 206 errors, 96 errors and 35 errors per 1000 words. The following section…

By using the formative experiment, this study investigated how an instructional intervention, consisting of a Repeated Reading (RR) technique and an iPod Touch, helped achieve a valued pedagogical goal, that of enhancing the Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) of sixteen English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) first-year university students. Students…

Studies investigating individual differences in reading ability often involve data sets containing a large number of collinear predictors and a small number of observations. In this article, we discuss the method of Random Forests and demonstrate its suitability for addressing the statistical concerns raised by such data sets. The method is…

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between perceptions of the self-efficacy levels for both mathematics literacy and information literacy in pre-service primary mathematics teachers and the factors on which the relationship depends (variables include gender, class level, hours spent reading books and computer-access…

This study is a quantitative, quasi-experimental investigation focusing on the effects of word recognition training on word recognition fluency, reading speed, and reading comprehension for 151 Japanese university students at a lower-intermediate reading proficiency level. Four treatment groups were given training in orthographic, phonological,…

In this study we assessed the effects of paragraph length on the reading speed and comprehension of students. Students were randomly assigned to one of three groups: short paragraph length (SPL), medium paragraph length (MPL), or long paragraph length (LPL). Students read a 1423 word text on a computer screen formatted to align with their group…

Despite the longstanding belief in an inner voice, there is surprisingly little known about the perceptual features of that voice during text processing. This article asked whether readers infer nonlinguistic phonological features, such as speech rate, associated with a character's speech. Previous evidence for this type of auditory imagery has…