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…

The Center on Literacy and Deafness examined the language and reading progress of 336 young deaf and hard-of-hearing children in kindergarten, first and second grades on a series of tests of language, reading, and spoken and fingerspelled phonological awareness in the fall and spring of the school year. Children were divided into groups based on…

The present study reports on the development and standardization of a test of phonological processing in Arabic, a language that has been less researched in terms of reading processes potentially due to the limited number of standardized tools. The test includes measures of phonological awareness, phonological memory and rapid naming, and a…

In this article, a three-phase mixed-methods study was conducted to investigate timed reading effects on Chinese university students' English as a foreign language (EFL) reading rate. First, two equivalent reading rate tests were designed and validated with 30 participants. Second, 81 university students from two intact classes participated in the…

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…

This study aimed to determine the effects of nursery rhymes, entertaining and prominent products of Turkish folk literature, on improving reading fluency of fourth-grade primary school students. The sample consisted of 44 fourth graders, attending a public primary school in Vakfikebir County of Trabzon province (Turkey) in the 2015-2016 academic…

Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) is a useful method for controlling the timing of text presentations and studying how readers' characteristics, such as working memory (WM) and reading strategies for time allocation, influence text recall. In the current study, a modified version of RSVP (Moving Window RSVP [MW-RSVP]) was used to induce…

Single-case designs provide an established technology for evaluating the effects of academic interventions. Researchers interested in studying the long-term effects of reading interventions often use curriculum-based measures of reading (CBM-R) as they possess many of the desirable characteristics for use in a time-series design. The reliability…

We examined the developmental relationship between cognitive-linguistic skills (nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid automatised naming [RAN]), home environment factors (direct teaching, shared book reading, access to literacy resources, parents' expectations, family's socioeconomic status [SES]), and pinyin letter knowledge in…

Reading acquisition is based on a set of preliteracy skills that lay the foundation for future reading abilities. Phonological awareness--the ability to identify and manipulate the sound units of oral language--has been reported to play a central role in reading acquisition. However, current evidence is mixed with respect to its universal…

This paper computes estimates of the potential for Extensive Reading (ER) and Extensive Viewing (EV) to support the academic and discipline-specific vocabulary needs of students. While research into ER/EV for general vocabulary is well-established, only recently has academic vocabulary begun to be researched. Given curriculum time constraints,…

To pinpoint difficulties in the second language (L2) processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences, this study investigates first language (L1) effects and effects of verb bias, i.e. frequency information about preferential verb complements, on semantic persistence effects in L2 sentence comprehension. We tested 32 L1 German and 32 L1 Turkish…

This study is an extension of Nahatame's (2018) research that demonstrated the effects of causal and semantic relations between sentences on second language (L2) text processing. Employing eye tracking, this study aimed to examine whether these effects appear during more natural, uninterrupted reading processes and to identify the time course of…

The RI-Val model of comprehension includes a validation process in which linkages formed by integration are matched against active memory. In five experiments, we investigated factors that influence validation. Reading times were measured on target sentences that contained either correct information or semantically related, but incorrect content.…

We investigated the contribution of morphological awareness to university students' reading comprehension ability. Although there is considerable evidence that morphological awareness contributes to children's reading ability, there is much less evidence concerning adults; the few studies of adults have not controlled other known predictors of…