Our investigation involves an analysis of the miscues made by both native speakers and non-native speakers of English while reading aloud in English. The results of our miscue analysis support there being one common underlying reading process in both first and second languages involving the active construction of meaning through the application of both top-down and bottom-up strategies. Languag...

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...

Although interactivity is considered a fundamental principle of cognitive (and computational) models of reading, it has received far less attention in neural models of reading that instead focus on serial stages of feed-forward processing from visual input to orthographic processing to accessing the corresponding phonological and semantic information. In particular, the left ventral occipito-te...

Foreign Language Reading Anxiety (FLRA), distinguished as a distinct phenomenon from general language anxiety, has been shown to have a negative impact on reading comprehension skill especially for less proficient EFL learners. FLRA is believed to originate from "unfamiliar writing system" or learners' difficulty in pronouncing words and sentences (Saito, Graza, & Horwitz, 1999). Slow or word b...

There is evidence that people with social anxiety show abnormal processing of emotional faces. To investigate the impact of top-down prediction on emotional face processing in social anxiety, brain responses of participants with high and low social anxiety (LSA) were recorded, while they performed a variation of the emotional task, using high temporal resolution event-related potential techniqu...

This paper reports the results of a study designed to investigate the interrelationship of Foreign Language Reading Anxiety (FLRA), Reading Proficiency (RP) and Text Feature Awareness (TFA). The aim was to focus on how foreign language reading anxiety and text feature awareness are related and how, in turn, they affect students reading proficiency. That is, it south to determine how these three...

Objectives: Reading is a language skill based on visual modality which recently is addressed as a facilitator of expressive language in children with Down syndrome. The aim was designing a whole word reading protocol and examining its effects on the language skills of children with Down syndrome. Methods: A whole word reading protocol was developed and was examined through a single-subject s...

Although filling the gap in reading comprehension gained momentum with the rise of the top-down approach, Vygotsky’ concept of scaffolding and the dual code  theory provided a strong support for the use of paratext to enhance comprehension. Scaffolding is dependent on other-regulation, one type of which is object-regulation. From this vantage-point, various types of paratext can function as sou...