Little research has been conducted to investigate the effect of analogy on third language (L3, hereafter) reading comprehension though some experts believe that it has facilitating and debilitating effects on L1 and L2 respectively. This article explores the effect of analogies on reading comprehension of expository texts by students of English as…

Today there is an increasing amount of research promoting the effectiveness of extensive reading (ER) towards increasing learners' vocabulary, comprehension, reading speed, and motivation towards reading. However, little has been done to measure the effects of ER on learners' reading levels. This quantitative study examined the effects…

Learning English as a foreign language (EFL) has long been regarded a challenging task. Said challenge is clearly evident in the many studies attempting to delineate some of the major problems faced by EFL learners while trying to uncover both the sources and the solutions. This paper turns to the Vygotskian approach to language learning, in…

This paper reports a study that explored the overall pattern of metacognitive awareness of reading strategy use and its possible relationship with reading comprehension. Moreover, the study investigated the influence of gender and proficiency level on the use of these strategies. The Survey of Reading Strategies Questionnaire (SORS), the…

This study concerns the effect of letter position on the retention of words by EFL learners. Given the fact that everyone has a mental lexicon, we would suggest that words are possibly organized in alphabetical order, then it would be likely for the learners to retain the words easily when exposed to the first letters of given words. The study…

Second language reading comprehension is the most important skill required by students, especially in a foreign language context. One way to help these students improve their reading comprehension is strategy instruction. In the present study, the effect of two strategies, namely, summarizing and students-generated questions have been…

With 73 students at an Iranian university, the present study investigated teacher's effect in topic familiarization in L2 reading context. The participants--Group B with and Group A without the presence of a teacher--experienced four pre-reading treatments and read four passages of unfamiliar topics, after which they were tested on…

The current study investigated the relation and comparison of reading comprehension and reading rate in Japanese high school EFL learners. One hundred and forty-eight tenth-graders in a Japanese high school participated in this study. Results showed that the relation between reading comprehension and reading rate was weak, but significant (r =…

Anxiety is an important personality factor that has been a major concern for foreign language (FL) researchers. Although the influence of anxiety on FL speaking has received considerable attention in research, only a few studies to date have focused on affect and FL reading. Clearly, there is need to use think aloud protocols and learner…

The objectives of this study are twofold: (1) uncovering the local criteria for evaluating language-teaching performance, and (2) unraveling and conceptualizing language teachers' perception of these criteria. To this end, the study used grounded theory to collect and analyze interview data from twelve experienced language teachers who were…

This study explored the effect of video games as a new tool for Iranian EFL (English as a foreign language) vocabulary learning. To conduct the study, 40 intermediate EFL learners, both male and female, were chosen through a TOEFL proficiency test. The participants were divided into two groups (10 males and 10 females in each): a control group and…

This study investigated the cognitive strategies used by Persian EFL (English as a foreign language) graduate students while reading a hypermedia text. Prior to the start of the study, the Nelson-Denny Reading Test was used in order to measure the reading ability of the students. Data was collected through think-aloud protocols, and the strategies…

The present research investigated the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies by 60 young and 90 adult learners of different levels of education across different fields of study. The intermediate level young participants included junior-high and senior-high school learners between the ages of 14 and 17. The high-intermediate adult…

This study investigated the developmental and fossilized prepositional errors in Persian EFL learners' compositions at three levels of proficiency; participants were divided into lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced levels. For each participant, four compositions were collected, and after identifying the prepositional errors for…

In this paper, I argue that in-service language-teacher education programs should consider all elements of the linguistic, geographical and cultural context of the teachers the course is designed for, and respond to this context in a constructivist way in program design and implementation. Using qualitative case-study data, I focused on the…