Background: Testing and teaching are interrelated in education process; using various kinds of tests, teachers are able to anticipate the strong and weak points of learning in students, their progress and their accomplishment. The influence of test on teaching and learning is commonly referred to as washback. Testing washback is a twisted concept that becomes even more complex under a various i...

This study first explores intermediate-level English learners’ preferences for hypermedia annotations while they are engaged in reading a hypermedia text. Second, it examines whether multimedia annotations facilitate reading comprehension in the second language. The participants were 44 adult learners of English as a foreign language studying English for Academic Purposes. Data were collected t...

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...

Background & Aims:  Recently, the role of English has shifted from the more general perspective of every day usage to a narrower situation and task specific perspective. Many experts in the field argue that Learners need English for a particular task or a field of study and successful courses are those that concentrate on one particular area in teaching English.  Accordingly, the pr...

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has become enormously popular recently and has attracted a lot of attentions. However, existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English. To add diversity in reading comprehension datasets, in this paper we propose a new Chinese reading comprehension dataset for accelerating related research in the community. The proposed dataset contains two diff...

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...

Despite the growing number of studies highlighting the complex process of acquiring second language (L2) word recognition skills, comparatively little research has examined the relationship between word recognition and passage-level reading ability in L2 learners; further, the existing results are inconclusive. This study aims to help fill the gap. Three word recognition subcomponents (decoding...