Many widely-used approaches for assessing text difficulty provide a single prediction equation that is assumed to hold for texts belonging to a variety of different genres. This paper demonstrates that such models tend to overpredict the difficulty of informational texts while simultaneously underpredicting the difficulty of literary texts. Mechanisms that may account for these effects are exam...

It is now widely maintained that the concept of "literariness" has been critically examined and found deficient. Prominent literary theorists have argued that there are no special characteristics that distinguish literature from other texts. Similarly, cognitive science has often subsumed literary understanding within a general theory of discourse processing. However, a review of empirical stud...

The present Study aimed to examine the efficacy of using literary texts in promoting intercultural communication competence, and intercultural awareness and understanding within language teaching contexts. The participants were 50 Iranian undergraduate students of English Literature, 20 male and 30 female, with their ages ranging from 19 to 24 engaged in reading and discussing literary texts wi...

Defining the specific role of the factors that affect metaphor processing is a fundamental step for fully understanding figurative language comprehension, either in discourse and conversation or in reading poems and novels. This study extends the currently available materials on everyday metaphorical expressions by providing the first dataset of metaphors extracted from literary texts and score...

This paper follows up on the work of Crossley, Louwerse, McCarthy & McNamara (2007), who conducted an exploratory study of the linguistic differences of simplified and authentic texts found in beginner level English as a Second Language (ESL) textbooks using the computational tool Coh-Metrix. The purpose of this study is to provide a more comprehensive study of second language (L2) reading text...

The opinions of second language learning (L2) theorists and researchers are divided over whether to use authentic or simplified reading texts as the means of input for beginningand intermediate-level L2 learners. Advocates of both approaches cite the use of linguistic features, syntax, and discourse structures as important elements in support of their arguments, but there has been no conclusive...

The importance of vocabulary learning has been underlined in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) because non-English majors who require reading English texts in their fields of study have to expand their English vocabulary knowledge much more efficiently than ordinary ESL/EFL learners. Since academic vocabulary instruction in Iranian universities is realized through the use of Gene...

This article describes a joint research work between Monash University and the University of Alicante, where software originally meant for plagiarism and copy detection in academic works is successfully applied to perform comparative analysis of di erent editions of literary works. The experiments were performed with Spanish texts from the Miguel de Cervantes digital library. The results have p...