Examination of the written recalls produced by 45 high-intermediate proficiency English-as-a-Second-Language students indicated that there were differences in the quality of information recalled as a function of text structure, with students who used the structure of reading passages to organize written recall showing superior quantitative and…

The separate and interactive effects of three kinds of background knowledge (content area, context of materials presentation, and lexical items in the text) on reading comprehension were studied. Unlike native readers, nonnatives neither show significant effects of background knowledge nor appear to have a good sense of the text's difficulty. (MSE)

Reports an empirical study which compared recalls of two types of stories--one well-structured and the other deliberately not well-structured--by students of English as a second language. Results indicate that the quantity and temporal sequence of story recall are affected by differences in story structure. (SED)

Studied the relationships between the personality types of a group of English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students in Indonesia and various measures of their academic performance in a course with EFL language measures. Students were almost evenly divided between extroverts and introverts with a distribution of types similar to those of…

An English discourse completion questionnaire consisting of 60 situations designed to elicit suggestions in English was administered to 28 native speakers of Chinese or Malay and to 12 native speakers of American English. Non-native speakers of English were more direct in their responses. Native and non-native speakers significantly differed in…

The theoretical linguistic distinction between assertion and presupposition was empirically tested with two groups of subjects, young children acquiring English as their first language and adults acquiring English as a second language. (Author)