Advances in text simplification depend on reliable judgments of sentence difficulty. The ability of untrained native English speakers to judge sentence difficulty in the presence of variation in semantic similarity is examined using cloze tests and a forced-choice comparison task. Judgments from participants in web-based experiments demonstrate ability to assess sentence difficulty of professio...

This article presents the Provo Corpus, a corpus of eye-tracking data with accompanying predictability norms. The predictability norms for the Provo Corpus differ from those of other corpora. In addition to traditional cloze scores that estimate the predictability of the full orthographic form of each word, the Provo Corpus also includes measures of the predictability of the morpho-syntactic an...

One of the most important language skills affecting students' success in academic settings is reading comprehension and the ability to read fluently in a second language. Japanese EFL learners' less than satisfactory performance in standard English tests led Shinozuka, Mizusawa, and Shibata (2014) to design the read-aloud method. This study investigated the effectiveness of this newly designed ...

We present an internet-based system that helps teachers to make a cloze test on an online news article. The current system supports question making on grammar and vocabulary of English. The system works as an assistant to the teacher. It helps the user to choose an article, highlights grammar targets, suggests possible choices for the wrong alternatives, and formats the questions in a printer-f...

This paper presents a pilot system and discusses its possible extensions. In the first sections, we present a web-based test authoring system for English grammar and vocabulary. It assists language teachers to make questions on arbitrary input texts, such as online news. The system employs the techniques of NLP (Natural Language Processing) and is compared with other studies in the same field. ...

The present study investigated children's comprehension of reading material which was of either highor low-interest. Previous research indicates that children comprehend more of highthan low-interest material when each child is given a mixture of both types of material. This effect could be due to a contrast effect whereby children selectively respond to the more appealing passages in their set...