Duolingo is a commercial language-teaching platform that offers free courses on the web and on mobile apps. This study reports the ACTFL listening and reading proficiency levels of adult Duolingo learners who had completed beginning-level courses in Spanish or French. The participants (n = 225) were learners residing in the United States, had…

Mobile devices are increasingly promoted as tools to facilitate ubiquitous and individualized learning, allowing learners to work at their own pace in authentic and meaningful settings. However, in the case of second language learning, there is a paucity of apps and tools related to improving students' reading comprehension in both Spanish and…

This document presents the proceedings of the 25th Annual Research Forum held June 30, 2021, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following eighteen action research papers: (1) Using Modern Events to Teach United States History (Charles Ahern); (2) "We Are All ESL Teachers": Culturally and…

Reading texts with historical and sociopolitical content in a foreign language is often a challenge for second language students. The obstacles encountered by students should be of concern to language instructors. Lack of background knowledge frequently causes the reader to abandon the reading activity with a sense of disappointment and…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 11th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2014), October 25-27, 2014, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) and endorsed by the Japanese Society for Information and Systems in…

A method is outlined for using works of Spanish literature at the intermediate level. This approach is illustrated, using three novels: "El Rapto" (Ayala), "El Tunel" (Sabato), and "Nada" (Laforet). A key passage is studied in depth, topics are assigned for extension of the content, and a composition is written. (CFM)

Investigates the relationship between overall comprehension and the comprehension of coreferential ties for second-language readers of Spanish literature. Significant correlations between overall comprehension and coreferent identification indicate that coreferential tie errors may be symptomatic of confusion about another entity in the text. (42…

The four issues of this journal, written entirely in Spanish, are intended for reading teachers. The first issue focuses on the role of school in the development of readers and writers and contains articles discussing the results of an investigation into the validity of the idea of "level" when measuring students' comprehension of…

A study of the effect of function words on reading comprehension had as subjects 99 college students of English as a second language (ESL) divided into four groups. The treatment was the reading of a set of passages, written in four versions. In version 1 all function words were deleted; in version 2 function words with semantic weight were…

Examines the relationship between lexical and grammatical knowledge to reading and listening comprehension. University students learning Spanish participated in the study. All participants performed the tests of lexical knowledge and grammatical knowledge respectively. Results suggest both similarities and differences between reading and listening…

A college-level course is described that is designed to increase oral proficiency and comprehension in Spanish and to introduce students to the culture of the Hispanic world. The course is taught in Spanish, and faculty members from other disciplines serve as guest lecturers to provide reinforcement of material learned in the areas of history,…

Across 4 experiments, 121 college students and 80 Spanish-English bilingual members of the university community read narrative or expository texts and answered comprehension questions. Manipulating intervals between readings, language, and the activity between the readings indicates that all these variables influence whether a repeated reading…

Discusses using students' native language (L1) versus second language in testing instruments for reading comprehension in the second language (L2) classroom. Students of college-level Spanish were tested under different conditions involving combinations of the L1 and L2. Suggests using open-ended reading comprehension tests if some questions are…

Think-aloud protocols were gathered to establish that first-year college level participants noticed targeted linguistic forms (Spanish formal imperatives) while reading an enhanced or unenhanced text. Suggests there are no significant benefits of written input enhancement over unenhanced written input for the amount of reported noticing of Spanish…

Investigation of second language readers' awareness and use of first and second language reading strategies indicated that in first language reading "local" reading strategies correlate negatively with reading performance. Local strategies were positively correlated for English first language readers of Spanish, while global strategies were…