this study sought to explore the possible relationship between reading anxiety and reading proficiency and also between reading anxiety and language learners’ use of reading strategies. the majority of studies on language anxiety have been quantitative to date. this study was conducted in two phases. the first phase was quantitative, and the second consisted of a series of case studies using in...

Following an extensive overview of the subject, this study explores the relationships between secondlanguage (L2) explicit/implicit knowledge sources, embedded in the declarative/procedural memory systems, and L2 working memory (WM) capacity. It further examines the relationships between L2 reading comprehension and L2 WM capacity as well as those between L2 reading comprehension and L2 explici...

“Protocol analysis” or “think-alouds” or have been extensively employed in the fields of psychology and cognitive science as a verbal-report method of producing concurrent verbalization. Think-alouds require participants to tell researchers what they are thinking and doing while performing a task. The participants are usually instructed to keep thinking aloud, acting as if they are alone in the...

We examined the roles of metacognitive awareness of reading strategies, syntactic awareness in English, and English vocabulary knowledge in the English reading comprehension of Chinese-speaking university students (n = 278). Results suggested a two-factor model of a General Reading Knowledge factor (metacognitive awareness employed during the English reading process) and a Second Language (L2) ...

BACKGROUND This study examines the role of decoding and vocabulary skills as longitudinal predictors of reading comprehension in young first (L1) and second (L2) language learners. METHODS Two-group latent growth models were used to assess differences in growth and predictions of growth between the 198 L1 and 90 L2 language learners. RESULTS L1 learners had better initial reading comprehens...

To investigate factors that motivate Japanese high school students to read English extensively, I assessed 219 female high school students who participated in an extensive reading program for 1 academic year. The results showed that the 2 most influential factors were students’ intrinsic motivation for first language (L1) reading and second language (L2) reading. However, no positive relationsh...

Although story mapping strategy has been shown to be beneficial in many reading comprehension classes, the benefits of this technique have not been thoroughly investigated in L2 writing research. The small number of previous studies (e.g., Li, 2007; Brunner, 2010) have found the potential benefits of using story mapping strategy on students’ writing performance, but they did not focus on differ...

to be able to reach the level of ultimate attainment in the second language, learners need to acquire not only the grammar of the l2 but also the language processing mechanisms involved in the comprehension of sentences in real time. contrary to its importance, very little is known yet about online l2 processing. this study examines whether advanced iranian learners of english reactivate disloc...

This study examined the contribution of word decoding, first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) vocabulary and prior topic knowledge to L2 reading comprehension. For measuring reading comprehension we employed two different reading tasks: Woodcock Passage Comprehension and a researcher-developed content-area reading assignment (the Global Warming Test) consisting of multiple lengthy texts. ...