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…

A word's predictability, as measured by its cloze probability, has a robust influence on the time a reader's eyes spend on the word, with more predictable words receiving shorter fixations. However, several previous studies using the boundary paradigm have found no apparent effect of predictability on early reading time measures when the reader…

The effects of extensive, timed, and repeated oral reading on 101 lower-intermediate Japanese university L2 English learners' reading rates and comprehension were investigated over one academic year. The participants were divided into four quasiexperimental groups: (a) Group 1 did extensive, timed, and repeated oral reading with prosody and…

Readers' prior knowledge is an important factor for comprehending scientific texts. The study used an eye tracker to examine the reading processes of the undergraduates with high (HPK) and low prior knowledge (LPK) while reading a long printed scientific article. The results of measuring the eye movements offered some interesting findings. First,…

Facilitated identification of predictable words during online reading has been attributed to the generation of predictions about upcoming words. But highly predictable words are relatively infrequent in natural texts, raising questions about the utility and ubiquity of anticipatory prediction strategies. This study investigated the contribution of…

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…

The study investigates automated and controlled cognitive processes that occur when university students read multiple documents (MDs). We examined data of 401 students dealing with two MD sets in a digital environment. Performance was assessed through several comprehension questions. Recorded log data gave indications about students' time…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

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…

This study statistically examines students who conduct extensive reading in the first and second semesters by focusing on the reading volume of word counts to address the following research questions: 1) Is there a difference in word counts between students who conduct extensive reading in the first semester and those who continue it in the second…

This study examined the role of source credibility in the validation of factual information embedded in short narratives. In a self-paced reading experiment, we tested the assumption that the degree of (im-)plausibility determines the extent that source credibility affects validation during comprehension. We used reading times of target and…

The generation of predictive inferences may be difficult when a story leads to multiple possible consequences. The present study examined whether inferences are generated when the story implies two mutually exclusive consequences are nearly equally likely to occur. Experiment 1 used a word-naming task and showed that neither inference was…

This study examined the extent to which textual enhancement and task manipulation affect the learners' attentional processing and the development of second language (L2) grammatical knowledge. A total of 73 Korean college students read an opinion news article in one of four experimental conditions: (1) textually enhanced, careful reading, (2)…

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…