The current pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study sought, firstly, to examine the effect of employing flipped language teaching techniques on EFL learners' text comprehension and, secondly, to explore whether there was any significant interaction between the flipped classroom approach and EFL learners’ proficiency level. To this end, 65 male and female EFL learners were conveniently selecte...

The ability to detect fluctuation in students’ comprehension of text would be very useful for many intelligent tutoring systems. The obvious solution of inserting comprehension questions is limited in its application because it interrupts the flow of reading. To investigate whether we can detect comprehension fluctuations simply by observing the reading process itself, we developed a statistica...

In this paper we discuss two experiments on the role that comprehension monitoring skills play in selecting the reading order of hypertextual information and comprehending this information. In the first experiment, learners who could be characterized as learners with low prior knowledge comprehended the hypertext better when they selected a coherent reading order. Further, number of links per p...

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...

Reading comprehension has embraced a booming in recent NLP research. Several institutes have released the Cloze-style reading comprehension data, and these have greatly accelerated the research of machine comprehension. In this work, we firstly present Chinese reading comprehension datasets, which consist of People Daily news dataset and Children’s Fairy Tale (CFT) dataset. Also, we propose a c...

This study, situated in an EFL context, aimed at discovering the ways purposes behind reading activities  influence  vocabulary  knowledge  gain  and  retrieval.  Seventy  five  elementary  learners of  English  were  randomly  assigned  to  three  groups  of  ‘free  reading’,  ‘reading  comprehension’ and ‘reading to summarize’. A modified text was administered to all the three groups. The dat...

it is well documented that language learning success or failure is influenced by the affective side of the learner. self-efficacy and anxiety are among the affective factors influencing language learning. this study first explores the relationship between efl learners' self-efficacy in reading comprehension and their reading anxiety. secondly, it explores the relationship between efl learners' ...

Sense of humor as a key factor for increasing the effect of instruction has been overlooked by research in the field of education. This study was an attempt to investigate the effects of the use of humor on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. For this purpose, a group of Iranian EFL learners were taught reading comprehension through the use of humorous passages while another group of learners ...

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical representations (semantic relatedness); as such, it serves as an output for the decoding process and as ...