This paper discusses how to change English-as-a-Second. Language reading instruction within Japanese senior high schools into communication, or interaction between students and the text. It focuses on the use of top-down skills to increase reading comprehension, noting that Japanese teachers tend to naturally emphasize bottom-up skills and neglect top-down skills. Four chapters look at the foll...

it is well documented that language learning success or failure is influenced by the affective side of the learner. self-efficacy and anxiety are among the affective factors influencing language learning. this study first explores the relationship between efl learners' self-efficacy in reading comprehension and their reading anxiety. secondly, it explores the relationship between efl learners' ...

This study was undertaken to test the hypothesis that some of the items included in the Canadian Language Benchmarks Assessment Reading Subtest favour certain cultural groups. For example, it was posited that Mandarin speakers, who have a tendency to use bottom-up, local reading strategies, would perform better on particular questions than Arabic speakers, who tend to use topdown, global readin...

Although many cognitive models in anxiety propose that an impaired top-down control enhances the processing of task-irrelevant stimuli, few studies have paid attention to task-irrelevant stimuli under a cognitive load task. In the present study, we investigated the effects of the working memory load on attention to task-irrelevant stimuli in trait social anxiety. The results showed that as trai...

Models of anxiety disorders posit that information processing biases towards threat may result from an imbalance between top-down attentional control processes and bottom-up attentional processes, such that anxiety could reduce the influence of the former and increase the influence of the latter. However, researchers have recently pointed to limitations of the top-down/bottom-up terminology and...

According to Attentional Control Theory (Eysenck et al., 2007) anxiety impairs the inhibition function of working memory by increasing the influence of stimulus-driven processes over efficient top-down control. We investigated the neural correlates of impaired inhibitory control in anxiety using an antisaccade task. Low- and high-anxious participants performed anti- and prosaccade tasks and ele...

this study is aimed at investigating the general foreign language classroom anxiety levels of iranian university students through administering horwitz scale (flcas) in addition to examining their reading anxiety through replicating saito’s reading comprehension anxiety scale (flras). the researchers further checked the former by developing and performing a new five–point likert type questionna...

Reading involves mapping combinations of a learned visual code (letters) onto meaning. Previous studies have shown that when word recognition is challenged by degradation, one way to mitigate these negative effects provide "top–down" contextual support through written congruent sentence context. Crowding naturally occurring phenomenon impairs object and also affects the stimuli during reading. ...