Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to compare brain activation from Japanese readers reading hiragana (syllabic) and kanji (logographic) sentences, and English as a second language (L2). Kanji showed more activation than hiragana in right-hemisphere occipito-temporal lobe areas associated with visuospatial processing; hiragana, in turn, showed more activation than kanji in ar...

Reading exercises are critical for developing strong reading comprehension. However, due to resource constraints and a lack of accurate evaluation methods, English instructors can hardly assess student reading ability effectively. In past decades, learning by reading is known to be challenging for both teachers and students involved, especially for students learning English as a Foreign Languag...

Reading, an important skill in any language, becomes more difficult in a foreign language. The investigation of expository text comprehension between language groups conducted in 1999 at Vytautas Magnus University and South Carolina University (Škudienė, 1999) showed that the students of both language groups (Lithuanian and English) performed better in literal comprehension tasks. On these grou...

Of paramount importance in the study of cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) is the absence of tests developed for small-scale diagnostic purposes. Currently, much of the research carried out has been mainly on large-scale tests, e.g., TOEFL, MELAB, IELTS, etc. Even so, formative language assessment with a focus on informing instruction and engaging in identification of student’s strengths and...

portfolios as a means of constructivist learning appear to show great promise in enhancing diverse dimensions of learning and promoting learner motivation. this study is an investigation into the effectiveness of portfolio development on the reading comprehension and academic motivation of undergraduate students majoring in english literature in iran. in order to answer the research questions, ...

This study investigated how English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners with different learning styles (Field dependent and field independent) boost up their reading comprehension abilities as they develop their metacognitive skills. To conduct this research, 60 participants were randomly invited to sit PET (Preliminary English Test) to ensure homogeneity of the participants in terms of language...

Cloze was officially introduced in a journal on Journalism as a technique for estimating text readability and as "a new psychological tool for measuring the effectiveness of communication" (Taylor, 1953: 415). Different varieties of cloze have since been developed and experimented upon as measures of such diverse traits as reading comprehension and language proficiency. The findings of numerous...

research shows a positive relationship between self-directed learning (sdl) andreading comprehension. the present quasi-experimental study attempted to expandthe scope of sdl by investigating its effect on the components of readingcomprehension. sixty high school students took the reading comprehension part ofpet as the pretest and the posttest. over 16 weeks, the experimental group,consisting ...

Auditory perceptual simulation (APS) during silent reading refers to situations in which the reader actively simulates the voice of a character or other person depicted in a text. In three eye-tracking experiments, APS effects were investigated as people read utterances attributed to a native English speaker, a non-native English speaker, or no speaker at all. APS effects were measured via onli...