The present study was undertaken to investigate the impact of comparative critical reading strategy on the writing ability of Iranian learners who were learning English as a foreign language (EFL). In order to carry on the study, 60 participants (25 males and 35 females aged between 19 to 27) at intermediate level of language proficiency were randomly assigned to two groups; that is, the experi...

Learning often involves integration of information from multiple texts. The aim of the current study was to determine whether relevant information from previously read texts is spontaneously activated during reading, allowing for integration between texts (experiment 1 and 2), and whether this process is related to the representation of the texts (experiment 2). In both experiments, texts with ...

The purpose of this paper was to see whether any significant relationship exists among EFL learners’ autonomy, left/right brain dominance, and reading comprehension of the Academic Reading and General Reading Modules of IELTS examination. To this end, 100 female EFL learners were randomly selected from those who were attending IELTS preparatory courses at a language school in Tehran. All partic...

Crime is a popular genre of fiction, widely read but sometimes seen as 'throwaway'. Disregarding this type of fiction because it is seen as low quality does not take into account its value to readers. Reading has been established as a means of improving mental health and well-being-often known as bibliotherapy. This often focuses on fiction considered to have literary merit rather than genre fi...

We describe a method used in the REAP tutor to automatically check whether students are reading practice texts for English vocabulary learning. The number of texts used by the REAP tutor and challenges of automatically generating reading comprehension questions necessitated a simpler type of question that could be computer-generated. We describe an algorithm for generating such reading-check qu...

Abstract The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between cohesive readability of expository texts and reading comprehension in EFL students with different proficiency levels. One hundred students formed the participant of this study. They were undergraduate students majoring in English at University of Isfahan. To collect the relevant data, participants were divide...

one important issue that any material or test designer should bear in mind is to be careful about developing teaching and testing reading materials which would not be to the benefit of a group of readers or examinees and to the detriment of some others. one of the factors which may cause difference between the performances of english learners or test takers is the selection of reading tests wit...

The present study investigated the effect of different types of text simplification (i.e., reducing the lexical and syntactic complexity of texts) on reading comprehension of English as a Foreign Language learners (EFL). Sixty female intermediate EFL learners from three intact classes in Tabarestan Language Institute in Tehran participated in the study. The intact classes were assigned to three...

PURPOSE There is a need for standardized texts to assess reading performance, for multiple equivalent texts for repeated measurements, and for texts equated across languages for multi-language studies. Paragraphs are preferable to single sentences for accurate speed measurement. We developed such texts previously in 6 languages. The aim of our current study was to develop texts in more language...

This study is a preliminary examination into the use of Coh-Metrix, a computational tool that measures cohesion and text difficulty at various levels of language, discourse, and conceptual analysis, as a means of measuring English text readability. The study uses 3 Coh-Metrix variables to analyze 32 academic reading texts and their corresponding readability scores. The results show that two ind...