This article sets out to examine the effect of utilizing different culturally-based materials on EFL university students' foreign language reading anxiety, reading comprehension self-efficacy, and reading proficiency within project-based classes. The research was carried out with two classes of intermediate freshmen majoring in English Language Teaching. The comparison group had to present thei...

the current article was an attempt to investigate the effect of semantic mapping strategy instruction on reading comprehension performance of efl learners. to this end, thirty homogeneous iranian intermediate efl learners attending a language school in bonab, iran, were randomly assigned to two groups, one as the experimental and the other as the control. the experimental group received instruc...

The present study attempted the relative effect of explicit teaching of textual metadiscourse markers on ESAP reading comprehension performance of Iranian university students through an awareness raising experiment. A sixty-item multiple choice ESAP reading comprehension test of accounting was developed and validated to act as the pre-test and post-test. The test included items for assessing sp...

Teaching How to Improve Reading Comprehension: One Way of Increasing Iranian Students' Scores on PIRLS M. Najafi Paazoki, Ph.D. The performance of Iranian students on the international reading tests (PIRLS) is indicative of a major problem in reading comprehension. From a constructivist perspective, there are strategies that can be learned and used in order to improve reading comp...

Publishing trends suggest that electronic books or e-books are the future of reading. Since teacher reading attitudes influence student reading attitudes, it is important to understand patterns of ebook use among pre-service teachers. One hundred ninety-nine pre-service teachers complete an online questionnaire that queried use of e-books and paper books or p-books. While the majority of pre-se...

This study is aimed at investigating students’ annotation behaviors and their effects on learning achievement with prereading (reading before class) exercises and Web-based sharing mechanisms. An 8-week quasi-experiment was conducted with 125 sixth-grade elementary school students. The study shows the following results. First, a significant correlation was evident between pre-reading with a Web...

This study attempted to determine the effect of background music while silent reading on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension. The participants were 57 Iranian EFL learners between the ages of 14 and 16 in two 3rd grade high schoolclasses at pre-intermediate proficiency level. Before treatment,both experimental and control groups took a reading comprehension pretest. In the experimental ...