one important issue that any material or test designer should bear in mind is to be careful about developing teaching and testing reading materials which would not be to the benefit of a group of readers or examinees and to the detriment of some others. one of the factors which may cause difference between the performances of english learners or test takers is the selection of reading tests wit...

Inspired by Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory (SCT), the current study intended to investigate the effect of summary training (i.e., oral and written) on intermediate EFL learners’ reading comprehension in different conditions (i.e., individual and collaborative). Data collection tools and procedures encompassed PET test, First Certificate in English (FCE) reading pre-test, and post-test. First, ...

Background: Cooperative learning as an educational approach plays a crucial role in English as a second/foreign language education. The effective role of cooperative learning seems to be so dominant that it deserves further investigation. Objectives: This study aimed at investigating the impact of cooperative learning strategies on reading comprehension and vocabulary learning of nursing stude...

Reading comprehension is widely agreed to be not one, but many things. At the least, it is agreed to entail cognitive processes that operate on many different kinds of knowledge to achieve many different kinds of reading tasks. Emerging from the apparent complexity, however, is a central idea: Comprehension occurs as the reader builds one or more mental representations of a text message (e.g., ...

introduction: acquisition of intelligible english pronunciation and comprehension of medical texts has been considered as an important need for medical students.  this can be improved by employing different methods and taking into consideration various learning styles of students. this study is an attempt to reveal the effect of cooperative learning on enhancing pronunciation and reading compre...

although filling the gap in reading comprehension gained momentum with the rise of the top-down approach, vygotsky’ concept of scaffolding and the dual code  theory provided a strong support for the use of paratext to enhance comprehension. scaffolding is dependent on other-regulation, one type of which is object-regulation. from this vantage-point, various types of paratext can function as sou...

This study investigated the effectiveness of discourse structure-based graphic organizers (GOs) on students’ reading comprehension. Seventy learners were randomly divided in two equal experimental and control groups. They took a pre-test of reading comprehension. Then the experimental group analyzed the textual structures based on the frameworks of GOs and discussed the cohesive and coherent de...

in this study two modes ofreading (car and traditional print mode) were compared in regards to their effectiveness for l2 reading comprehension. a group of 120 english major students were divided into three classes: car, traditional, and control. based on the english proficiency scores each class was divided into two groups (high and low levels of proficiency). three classes were taught by the ...