This study aimed to detect the extent to which comprehending elliptical structures predicted reading comprehension. The study utilized a correlational survey model, and participants involved a total of 173 middle school students. Data were collected through two different tools based on the same text in 2019. The ellipsis comprehension test…

To evaluate the sensitivity of multiple-choice cloze (MCC) tests that use different types of items--syntactic, semantic, and connective--to assess reading ability, 170 English as a foreign language (EFL) students in a vocational college in Taiwan were recruited. The students were divided into two groups (level A and level B) based on their scores…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…

Although sentence repetition is considered a reliable measure of children's grammatical knowledge, few studies have directly compared children's sentence repetition performance with their understanding of grammatical structures. The current study aimed to compare children's performance on these two assessment measures, using a multiple-choice…

This study aims to investigate patterns of variation in the interplay of L2 language ability and general reading comprehension skills in L2 reading, by comparing item-level effects of test-takers' results on L1 and L2 reading comprehension tests. The material comes from more than 500,000 people tested on L1 (Swedish) and L2 (English) in the…

The meaning of some phrasal verbs can be guessed from the meanings of the parts (to sit down = sit + down, run after = run + after) and the meaning of some others have to be learned (to put up (a visitor) = accommodate, to hold up = cause delay or try to rob someone) due to their syntactic and semantic complexities. In this regard, the syntactic…

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…

This study explored the effect of employing two language teaching approaches, i.e., schema-based instruction (SBI) and translation-based instruction (TBI) on the structure and vocabulary knowledge as well as reading comprehension ability of sixty undergraduate students studying general English in a medical school in Mashhad, Iran. While the SBI…