This paper describes an extensive reading program conducted in three rural secondary or middle schools in Malaysia, aimed at motivating the students to read extensively in English and helping them overcome their problems in understanding English texts as a means towards increasing their proficiency in the language. The paper begins by discussing the rationale for extensive reading for students ...

The primary objective of the present study was to investigate the relationship between language proficiency and socio-cultural factors among the Iranian MA students registered and entered at Shiraz University in 2008. The second objective was to explore whether or not one or a combination of socio-cultural factors are predictors of language proficiency. Finally, the study aims at investigating ...

A South African non-profit organisation, FunDza, launched a programme that delivers reading material via mobile phones. Computer log files of user activity over an eight-month period were analysed (N = 9,212,716), which showed that relatively large numbers of readers made use of the material (N = 65,533), and read a substantial amount of the material. We found evidence of positive shifts in rea...

Many studies have reported the necessity of phonological awareness to become a skilled reader, citing barriers to phonological information as the cause for reading difficulties experienced by deaf individuals. In contrast, other research suggests that phonological awareness is not necessary for reading acquisition, citing the importance of higher levels of syntactic and semantic knowledge. To d...

This study investigated whether technical university EFL learners’ reading proficiency affected their lexical inference performance and their responses to the contextual instruction. A total of 145 Taiwanese first-year technical university students participated in this study. The instruments in this study involved a GEPT test, a lexical inference task, and a vocabulary strategy questionnaire. P...

This study examined how speaker gender and talker proficiency affected realization of Taiwan Min /dz/ among young speakers of the 漳 Chiang and Mix dialect. Ten males and seven females with adequate proficiency were recruited to perform a paragraph reading task. Five major variant categories were observed, including dental sibilant, dental nonsibilant, velar obstruent, lateral, and retroflex. Ge...

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...

Effective reading skills are essential prerequisites for L2 proficiency which demand different metacognitive and cognitive to deal with the problems before during reading. These strategies adopted by proficient readers effective methods handle primary factors that influence proficiency. Therefore, current research provided a comprehensive review of affecting acquisition second-language skills. ...