As an important and a challenging source-based writing task, synthesizing offers rich opportunities to explore the connections between reading and writing. In this article, we report findings from a qualitative study of two Chinese students’ learning experiences with academic synthesis writing in a university ESL composition course. Specifically, we discuss how the two students’ understanding o...

This study was an investigation of how particular processing tasks influence L2 reading in relation to text type effects and L2 reading proficiency. Two groups of Japanese university EFL students (N = 103), varying in English reading proficiency, read a narrative passage and an expository passage in one of three task conditions: outlining, answering embedded questions, and reading only. All thr...

This empirical study explores how L2 learners access information while reading L2 texts in a Web-based learning environment. Twenty-three second-year German students read and summarized two online texts in the netLearn program, while their use of online multimedia support resources was tracked. Multimedia resources included a program-internal glossary, an online bilingual dictionary, and an aud...

When reading, proficient bilinguals seem to engage the same cognitive circuits regardless of the language in use. Yet, whether or not such "bilingual" mechanisms would be lateralized in the same way in distinct-single or dual-language contexts is a question for debate. To fill this gap, we tested 18 highly proficient Polish (L1) -English (L2) childhood bilinguals whose task was to read aloud on...

This project focuses on structural and prosodic effects during reading, examining their influence on agreement processing and comprehension in native English (L1) and Spanish-English bilingual (L2) speakers. We consolidate research from several distinct areas of inquiry-cognitive processing, reading fluency, and L1/L2 processing-in order to support the integration of prosody with a cue-based re...

A considerable number of studies have hitherto examined how native speakers and second language (hereafter L1 and L2, respectively) learners of English process English prepositional phrases. It is usually thought that both L1 and L2 speakers have a preference for verb phrase modification (e.g., The boy broke the old window with a ball of snow.) over noun phrase modification (e.g., The boy broke...