Typical print formatting provides no information regarding the linguistic features of a text, although texts vary considerably with respect to grammatical complexity and readability. Complex texts may be particularly challenging for individuals with weak language knowledge, such as English language learners. This paper investigates the usefulness…

Empirical evidence remains sparse about how videos enhanced with first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) subtitles influence cognitive load in L2 learners. To address this point, 25 Korean undergraduate students were exposed to six short videos: baseline, L1-subtitled, and L2-subtitled videos at both high and low difficulty levels (determined…

The aim of this experiment was to investigate how glossing influences second language (L2) reading comprehension in relation to text difficulty and the two local and global meaning representations. Fifty-eight undergraduate students were asked to read three easy, moderate, and difficult texts and, following each passage, answer twenty…

The importance of input on language learning cannot be overstated. One method of providing input to learners at a level that is appropriate for them is called extensive reading, in which learners read an abundance of texts. In practice, for learners of English as a second or foreign language, these texts are often books that have been written and…

The research genre has specific communicative purposes which require students to understand the tone, generic and disciplinary conventions. The present study explored the potential of thematic progression (TP) to contribute to research argument readability. TP concerns how clauses encode information and how that information is carried forward.…

Uganda Baptist Seminary (UBS) is accredited by the Ugandan National Council for Higher Education and teaches church leaders from Uganda and its surrounding seven countries. The required language of educational instruction is English, although the students come from a multitude of different native languages. This research stems from a need to…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

However influential the interdependence hypothesis has become in bilingual research, it still lacks full empirical support. This longitudinal study explores the parallels in the biliteracy development (L1 Spanish and L2 English) of 20 students in a European immersion programme (i.e. CLIL) over a two-year period. A bilingual learner corpus of…

This article reports on the academic performance and experiences of non-native university students, specifically German students in a Dutch academic environment. These students have a substantial dropout rate. In an earlier study, we found correlations between results on language tests and study results. In this study, we used semi-structured…

Standards of coherence are one of the major factors that influence reading comprehension. This study investigated the standards of coherence that second language (L2) learners employ when reading. In a pair of experiments, Japanese learners of English read two-sentence texts with varying causal and semantic relatedness between sentences and then…

This study investigates differences in the language and discourse characteristics of course blogs and traditional academic submissions produced in English by native (L1) and advanced second language (L2) writers. One hundred and fifty-two texts generated by 38 graduate students within the context of the same Master's level course were analysed…

In our study we investigated second and foreign language (L2) sentence readability, an area little explored so far in the case of several languages, including Swedish. The outcome of our research consists of two methods for sentence selection from native language corpora based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML)…

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…