Underspecification and coercion are two prominent interpretive mechanisms to account for meaning variability beyond compositionality. While there is plentiful evidence that natural language meaning constitution exploits both mechanisms, it is an open issue whether a concrete phenomenon of meaning variability is an instance of underspecification or…

There are three purposes of this paper, the first of which is to elucidate the theory and principles underlying extensive reading. Long-held principles will be discussed in light of practical classroom and contextual considerations. Secondly, a critical summary of current research on extensive reading that has been conducted in English as a Second…

Reading rate, a component of reading not closely attended to by educators and researchers prior to the 20th century, quickly became the subject of considerable research shortly after the turn of the century. This article uses historical content analysis to examine primary source documents from that period (1910-1925) to explore why reading rate…

Research has shown a wide range of learning benefits accruing from extensive reading. Not only is there improvement in reading, but also in a wide range of language uses and areas of language knowledge. However, few research studies have examined reading speed. The existing literature on reading speed focused on students' reading speed without…

The present set of 7 experiments systematically examined the effectiveness of adding causal explanations to simple refutations in reducing or eliminating the impact of outdated information on subsequent comprehension. The addition of a single causal-explanation sentence to a refutation was sufficient to eliminate any measurable disruption in…

The current study investigated the relation and comparison of reading comprehension and reading rate in Japanese high school EFL learners. One hundred and forty-eight tenth-graders in a Japanese high school participated in this study. Results showed that the relation between reading comprehension and reading rate was weak, but significant (r =…

Despite the growing number of studies highlighting the complex process of acquiring second language (L2) word recognition skills, comparatively little research has examined the relationship between word recognition and passage-level reading ability in L2 learners; further, the existing results are inconclusive. This study aims to help fill the…

Text comprehension models in first and second language reading research posit that slow word recognition inhibits reading speed and decreases comprehension. To investigate the role of word recognition in reading, 2 experiments examined rereading benefits in participants' first and second languages using scrambled and normal versions of English and…

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…

This study examined the relationship among word reading efficiency, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension for adult English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Data from 185 adult Chinese EFL learners preparing to take the Test-of-English-as-a-Foreign-Language[TM] (TOEFL[R]) were analyzed in this study. The participants completed a…

Paul Nation's talents and interests extend well beyond vocabulary to include research on speaking, writing, classroom learning and teaching, reading, and fluency. In keeping with Nation's interests in fluency, extensive reading, and reading instruction, I outline current perspectives on reading fluency and its role as a key component of reading…

Fluent reading is essential for successful comprehension. One dimension of reading fluency is reading rate, or reading speed. Because of the importance of reading fluency, fluency development activities should be incorporated into classroom practice. One activity that meets the fluency development conditions proposed by Nation (2007) is speed…

In this article, the author offers a short summary of the findings of the National Endowment for the Arts report on the status of reading, "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence", and an explanation of the guiding rationale for the study and some future areas of research that seem warranted in light of public responses to the…

The research investigated how comprehenders use verb information during syntactic parsing. Two reading experiments investigated the relationship between verb-specific variables and reading time. These experiments were close replications of prior work; however, two statistical techniques were used, rather than one. These were item-by-item…

Reading depends on the speed of visual recognition and capacity of short-term memory. To understand a sentence, the mind must read it fast enough to capture it within the limits of the short-term memory. This means that children must attain a minimum speed of fairly accurate reading to understand a passage. Learning to read involves "tricking" the…