this study was an attempt to investigate the comparative impact of two types of teaching approaches, namely content-based (cbi) and task-based (tblt) instruction on the reading comprehension of iranian efl learners. for this purpose, sixty intermediate students from a pool of eighty five students studying at a private language school were chosen using a piloted pet. the students were then rando...

Reading comprehension means reading and understanding, an active process which can be seen as a kind of dialogue between the reader and the text or the author. We often hear our students say that they can read the words but don’t know what the words mean. This paper focuses on schema theory with special attention to content schemata, analyses the reasons of the students’ failure in reading, poi...

The main purpose of this study was to compare the strategies used by Chinesespeaking students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in a multiplechoice format reading comprehension test. The focus was on describing what students do when they are taking reading comprehension tests by asking students to verbalize their thoughts. The strategies were further compared with participa...

Brain activation associated with normal and speeded comprehension of expository texts on familiar and unfamiliar topics was investigated in reading and listening. The goal was to determine how brain activation and the comprehension processes it reflects are modulated by comprehension speed and topic familiarity. Passages on more familiar topics differentially activated a set of areas in the ant...

this study seeks to examine how teachers’ educational background (those who have educated in tefl in comparison to those who have educated in literature) may influence their beliefs and attitudes on language learning, teaching and the teaching methods they apply in their classes. on a general basis, depending on teachers’ opinion, learning process might be seen as behavioristic, inductive, inte...

the present study seeks to investigate the potentiality of the translation task as a testing method for measuring reading comprehension. to achieve this objective, two types of translation tests, open-ended and multiple-choice tests, and two types of reading comprehension tests, multiple-choice reading comprehension and open-ended cloze tests were developed in this study. the reliability of the...

Previous research suggests that being interrupted while reading a text does not disrupt the later recognition or recall of information from that text. This research is used as support for Ericsson and Kintsch's (1995) long-term working memory (LT-WM) theory, which posits that disruptions while reading (e.g., interruptions) do not impair subsequent text comprehension. However, to fully comprehen...

A fundamental necessity at postgraduate level is a developed strategic reading skill that permits digesting tremendous amounts of technical academic content. The need is more paramount for EFL contexts and postgraduate students majoring in English Language Teaching (ELT) and English Literature (EL) most of whom will ultimately search a career in teaching.  The aim of the present ex-post facto s...

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...