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...

abstractthe present study investigated the effect of blended online and face-to-face instruction on the use of reading strategies by iranian efl learners. out of 100 pre-selected learners, 60 homogeneous participants were identified as intermediate, according to their scores on the oxford placement test. the participants were assigned to experimental (n=30) and control (n=30) groups. then, a pr...

research shows a positive relationship between self-directed learning (sdl) andreading comprehension. the present quasi-experimental study attempted to expandthe scope of sdl by investigating its effect on the components of readingcomprehension. sixty high school students took the reading comprehension part ofpet as the pretest and the posttest. over 16 weeks, the experimental group,consisting ...

We report results from ongoing research on developing sophisticated measures for assessing a student’s reading ability and a tool for the student and teacher to create a profile of this ability. In the project we will also investigate how these measures can be transformed to values on known criteria like vocabulary, grammatical fluency and so forth, and how these can be used to analyse texts. S...

Children are more impaired than adults by unfavorable listening conditions such as reverberation and noise. Nevertheless, the acoustical conditions in classrooms often do not fit the specific needs of young listeners. This field study aimed to analyze effects of classroom reverberation on reading abilities, annoyance due to indoor noise, and school attitudes in second graders. Performance and q...

This study investigated the cognitive and linguistic factors presumed to be associated with adult comprehension of figurative language, including age, working memory (WM), figurative language type, and reading comprehension (RC). Forty younger (M = 22 years) and 40 older (M = 63 years) healthy African American adults completed WM and reading tasks, and the 60-item forced-choice multiple-categor...

following a thorough survey of the available literature and concentrating on the wax and wane of testing pragmatic competence so far, the present study firstly is an attempt to develop a comprehensive test of inter-language pragmatics mainly focusing on academic situations in the iranian context. secondly, the study aims to investigate the criteria required for the selection of speech acts of a...

The purpose of the study was to assess the validity of a new version of the Token Test (TT) which is aimed at detecting deficits in auditory verbal working memory (henceforth WMTT). Twenty eight young healthy adults, 14 with and 14 without dyslexia, all paid volunteers, took part in the study. The WMTT was found to be positively and significantly correlated with tests of digit span forward and ...

This study examined what types of passage and individual item attributes of reading ability tests affect item difficulty. Ninety-six questions from the GatesMacGinitie Reading Test for 7/9th graders were analyzed in terms of individual item characteristics and passage features that were considered to affect the item’s difficulty. Whereas two passage features, word frequency and sentence length,...

The objectives of this study were to investigate Engineering students’ attitudes and problems in academic reading comprehension and to determine the contribution of academic reading attitude, breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge to academic reading comprehension. The participants were 122 undergraduate students of Engineering at Iran University of Science and Technology. The Vocabulary Lev...