Reading is an indispensable skill for learners who desire success throughout their academic lives, and vocabulary knowledge is a sine qua non companion of reading comprehension. Despite being inextricably related entities, very little has been written about the necessary vocabulary coverage to understand an expository text and its equivalent in…

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to review readability formulae and offer a critique, based on a comparison of the grading of a variety of texts given by six well-known formulae. Methodology: A total of 64 texts in English were selected either by or for native English speaking children aged between six and 11 years. Each text was assessed…

One of the objectives of the MAPEC-Life project is raising children's awareness on air quality and its health effects. To achieve this goal, we designed didactic tools for primary school students, including leaflets with more information for teachers, a cartoon, and three educational videogames. The tools were then tested with 266 children who…

This paper, deriving from a larger study, evaluates the readability of two Grade 4 natural sciences textbooks used by learners who speak English as an additional language in two South African schools. The study is set within the context of the reading-related transitional challenges faced by English second language learners when they move from the…

This study assessed a newly developed Sexual Communication Self-Efficacy Scale designed to measure the sexual communication self-efficacy of adolescent men and women. Three-hundred and seventy-four U.K. adolescents completed this new scale, along with several other validity measures. Factor analysis revealed that the Sexual Communication…

This study sought to examine the development of paragraph writing skills of 116 English as a second language university students over the course of 12 weeks and the relationship between the linguistic features of students' written texts as measured by Coh-Metrix--a computational system for estimating textual features such as cohesion and…

Given the deficiencies of readability formulae as reliable tools for measuring text readability in educational settings, this study aims to offer a new measure to improve the current methods of testing the readability levels of texts through the incorporation of the newly-developed concept of emotioncy. To this end, a group of 221 students were…

This paper reports the design of learning-oriented formative assessments in an EFL writing course that involved learners in regularly responding to teacher feedback. Following major assessment and feedback frameworks developed recently, these formative assessments were explicated in three aspects: the scheduling of learning and assessment…

This paper reports the findings of a study that investigated the effect of giving and receiving marginal L1 glosses on L2 vocabulary learning. To that end, forty nine Iranian learners of English were assigned to three different experimental conditions including marginal L1 glosses Giver (n = 17), marginal L1 glosses Receiver (n = 17), and no…

This study aimed to explore inference strategies necessary to successfully read journal articles. Eighty-eight graduate students read a set of texts on education and economic growth and answered comprehension questions. Twenty-four of these participants also volunteered for an in-depth interview. The findings revealed that students usually relied…

The article summarizes the results of the comparative study of Reading comprehension texts used in B2 level tests: Unified (Russia) State Exam in English (EGE) and Cambridge First Certificate in English (FCE). The research conducted was mainly focused on six parameters measured with the Coh-Metrix, a computational tool producing indices of the…

While the English language boasts a century of research into its most frequently-used words, no such attempt has ever formally been made in the Arab world. This pioneering study presents a list of 500 commonly-used words in the Arabic language based on compilations of words gathered from a number of popular reading series in Lebanon, spanning…

This study presents the processes of developing and establishing reliability and validity of a reading test by administering an integrative approach as conventional reliability and validity measures superficially reveals the difficulty of a reading test. In this respect, analysing vocabulary frequency of the test is regarded as a more eligible way…

We have been engaged in developing a readability index and its application software attuned for Japanese EFL learners. The index program, Ozasa-Fukui Year Level Program, Ver. 1.0, was used in developing the readability metric Ozasa-Fukui Year Level Index but tended to assume a high level of computer knowledge in its users. As a result, the…

This paper reports activities (as part of a university course in language teacher education on teaching reading) in which primary school student teachers (all ESL in-service teacher trainees) explored their own skills of determining textbook readability using an online software tool and a cloze test completed by two hundred and seventy-eight Grade…