Thirteen English as a foreign language students read 26 passages during a 13-week period. Each passage was read five times, and students answered comprehension questions after the first and the fifth reading. Another 13 students read the same number of passages but without repetition and only answered the comprehension questions once. All students…

This feature offers an archive of articles and books published in other venues during the past year and serves as a valuable tool to readers of "Reading in a Foreign Language" ("RFL"). It deals with any topic within the scope of "RFL" and second language reading. The articles are listed in alphabetical order, each…

Despite the growing number of studies highlighting the complex process of acquiring second language (L2) word recognition skills, comparatively little research has examined the relationship between word recognition and passage-level reading ability in L2 learners; further, the existing results are inconclusive. This study aims to help fill the…

Repeated reading, a procedure involving repetition of the same text, has received copious attention from first language reading research providing highly converging evidence of its potency for reading fluency, accuracy, and comprehension. In contrast, second language research on repeated reading has been scarce. The very few studies extant have,…

Nation (2006) has calculated that second language (L2) learners require much more vocabulary than previously thought to be functional with language (e.g., 8,000-9,000 word families to read independently). This level is far beyond the highest graded reader, and would be difficult to explicitly teach. One way for learners to be exposed to…

Paul Nation's talents and interests extend well beyond vocabulary to include research on speaking, writing, classroom learning and teaching, reading, and fluency. In keeping with Nation's interests in fluency, extensive reading, and reading instruction, I outline current perspectives on reading fluency and its role as a key component of reading…

Fluent reading is essential for successful comprehension. One dimension of reading fluency is reading rate, or reading speed. Because of the importance of reading fluency, fluency development activities should be incorporated into classroom practice. One activity that meets the fluency development conditions proposed by Nation (2007) is speed…

The unique structure of Russian orthography may influence the organization and acquisition of reading skills in Russian. The present review examines phonemic-graphemic correspondences in Russian orthography and discusses its grain-size units and possible difficulties for beginning readers and writers. Russian orthography is governed by a…

In reading research, studies on good and poor reader characteristics abound. However, these findings remain largely scattered in applied linguistics and cognitive and educational psychology. This paper attempts to synthesize current theory and research on the topic in the past 20 years along 3 dimensions: language knowledge and processing ability,…

Through a discussion of research that examines a plethora of variables involved in second language (L2) reading comprehension, the present study attempts to examine and analyze the statistical procedures utilized in studies of this nature. A review of recent research from the past five and a half years from four leading scientific journals of…

Presents the second part of a two-part annotated bibliography of work on extensive reading in a second language. The bibliography offers a classification that may be of value to the teacher or researcher in reading in a foreign language, and that may assist in course development. (Author/VWL)

Shows that native-speaking Arabic readers produce search functions that are radically different from the search functions of readers whose script uses the Roman alphabet (RAs). The processes used by Arabic readers are more akin to the processes used by RAs when searching arrays of shapes. (Author/LMO)

Examines previous research on extensive reading, and describes an experiment comparing the improvement of reading comprehension by Japanese college freshmen taught by either a skills-based or extensive reading procedure. Results suggest that extensive reading may be at least as effective as skills building, with the important advantage that it is…

Attempts to answer the question whether indentifiably separate levels of reading comprehension exist by judgmentally using 9 teachers at the University of Lancaster and empirically using 100 students from Bombay university. (Author/VWL)

Adult second language acquirers were asked to read the first two chapters of "A Clockwork Orange," a novel containing a number of slang words of Russian origin. Subsequent testing revealed modest but significant incidental acquisition of nadsat words. (Author/VWL)