The present study examined the components of oral reading fluency (ORF) via various indices and their relationships with comprehension and learner-perceived difficulty of oral reading among Chinese second language (L2) learners. One hundred participants read aloud paragraphs, completed the comprehension test, and rated the difficulty of the oral…

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…

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 study compared the reading speed, comprehension and perceptions of two groups of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. Each group addressed one of two types of narrow reading: same genre and same title. The same genre texts were three graded readers in the "Sherlock Holmes" series, and the same title texts were "The…

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…