This study was designed to investigate the effects of gender and Schema-based pre-reading activities on the Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension. The sample consisted of 60 male and female students studying at second-grade high school in Abhar city. Two reading passages (“Charles Dickens and the Little Children”, and “Hic, Hic, Hic”) were randomly selected from second-grade English textb...

Syntactic priming from comprehension to production has been shown to be robust: we are more likely to repeat structures that we have previously heard. Many current models do not distinguish between comprehension and production. Here we contrast human language processing with two variants of a Bayesian belief updating model. In the first model, production-to-production priming (i.e. selfpriming)...

This is a meta-analysis to study the effect of using pictorial aids on medication packaging and inserts on the comprehension of medication related information. Health literacy is a growing concern amongst health care systems globally. Research has demonstrated that people with low or marginal levels of literacy have lesser knowledge about their condition and understand “text-only” medication in...

Until not too long ago, the neurobiological model that has dominated our view on the neural architecture of language was the Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind model. In this classical model, the human language faculty was situated in the left perisylvian cortex, with a division of labor between the frontal and temporal regions. Wernicke’s area in left temporal cortex was assumed to subserve the comp...

Abstract Task-based language teaching is considered an effective way to achieve a harmony between grammar and communication. The present study investigates two different ways of teaching modal verbs: task-based versus traditional approaches. To this purpose, an Oxford Placement Test was administered to select 40 homogeneous participants out of a larger population who took this test. The selecte...

Drawing upon sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, the current study aims to investigate the effect of dyadic interaction in mixed and matched level proficiency pairings on comprehension and production of request and apology speech acts. The participants were 125 EFL learners who were randomly assigned to control and experimental (interaction) groups. Based on their scores in the pretest including ...

According to the cue-based parsing approach (Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006), sentence comprehension difficulty derives from interference from material that partially matches syntactic and semantic retrieval cues. In a 2 (low vs. high semantic interference)×2 (low vs. high syntactic interference) fMRI study, greater activation was observed in left BA44/45 for high versus low syntactic interf...

This study investigates and compares the efficacy of differentiated instruction and traditional-based instruction on enhancing Iranian students’ reading comprehension. Eight elementary, intermediate, and advanced classrooms from 1 language institute were chosen, and based on their performance on the pretests were further divided into 4 control and 4 treatment groups. Flexible grouping, tiered i...