This single subject experimental design study used an adapted alternating treatment design to examine the effects of a synthetic phonics intervention and an analytic phonics intervention on oral reading accuracy, oral reading rate, and letter-sound correspondences among first grade students. Students who were reading at least two levels below…

Many digital reading applications have built-in features to control the presentation flow of texts by segmenting those texts into smaller linguistic units. Whether and how these segmentation techniques affect the readability of texts is largely unknown. With this background, the current study examined a recent proposal that a sentence-by-sentence…

Background: German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been suggested that sentence-internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus…

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…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of iPad-assisted reading instruction for fourth-grade students' oral reading fluency and their attitudes towards reading. Three fourth-grade students at-risk for reading disabilities participated in an iPad-assisted repeated reading programme that integrated repeated reading, vocabulary…

This paper examines learners' fluency development in L2 silent reading rate and comprehension. In both L1 and L2 readings, a positive relationship between readers' silent reading rate and comprehension has not been as firmly established as theories might propose. Based on Wallot et al. (2014), the paper indicates the need to look at readers'…

In this research, we examined the responsiveness to treatment in 49 Italian children with Dyslexia. In part A, we compare the efficacy of a phonological-based treatment (Ph-T) with a cognitive training of executive functions (CT). In part B, we investigate whether a sequential treatment (CT+Ph-T) has a larger remedial effect compared to the pure…

Word boundary information is not marked explicitly in Chinese sentences and word ambiguity happens in Chinese texts. This introduces difficulty to parse characters into words when reading Chinese sentences, especially for beginning readers. In an eye-tracking study, we tested whether explicit word boundary information as provided by alternating…

Several in-depth and experimental research have been carried out on the positive results of extensive reading (ER) over the past several years in the areas of ESL/EFL. However, several of the studies include limitations that raise doubts about the claimed positive outcomes. The current study adds to the small amount of well-regulated research by…

Twenty adult ESL students at a community college participated in a semester reading intervention. Participants received a modified extensive reading treatment, and some participants received an additional repeated reading direct instruction reading intervention. The author examined the impact of the reading interventions on ESL students' reading…

The current study examined the effects of a silent rapid reading skills training intervention on the reading rate and reading achievement of primary school students in China in order to determine the efficacy of the intervention and explore potential gender differences. A total of 108 Chinese primary school students were randomly assigned by the…

We propose to use reading time as a metric to report progress in language learning applications. As a case study we use a web-based application that enables learners of a foreign language to read texts from the web and practice vocabulary with interactive exercises generated based on their past readings. The application captures generic…

Poorer adolescent readers are often regarded by teachers as unable to read whole narratives and given short, simplified texts, yet are expected to analyse every part in a slow laborious read-through. This article reports on a mixed methods study in which 20 English teachers in the South of England changed their current practice to read two whole…

This study examined the effect of pre-reading vocabulary instruction on learners' attention and vocabulary learning. We randomly assigned participants (L1 = 92; L2 = 88) to one of four conditions: pre-reading instruction, where participants' received explicit instruction on six novel items and read a text with the items repeated eight times;…

This quasi-experimental study traces a 12-week reading fluency training program for elementary-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners at a Japanese university (N = 56). More specifically, this study examined whether a teaching intervention combining (a) extensive reading and practicing, (b) timed reading, and (c) repeated oral reading…