This article highlights how Wolfgang Herrndorf's bestselling novel "Tschick" (2010) is particularly well suited for advanced courses focused on cultural and linguistic enrichment. Herrndorf's "Tschick," I argue, facilitates interaction, engagement, and individual interpretation; is linguistically accessible because of its use…

Learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) find it difficult to learn various sentence patterns. To assist JSL learners with their study of Japanese sentence patterns (JSPs), this paper constructs a human-machine collaborative framework that combines artificial intelligence (AI) techniques with the users' active participation for Japanese…

Extensive Reading (ER) emerges as a promising approach for acquiring a foreign language, allowing for a large amount of language exposure. However, the influence of supplementary activities within ER programs has yet to be thoroughly investigated, despite previous studies suggesting their potential effectiveness. This research investigated the…

Extensive reading is an approach to language learning that encourages learners to read a large quantity of easy reading material. A substantial body of research confirms the effectiveness of this approach for developing proficiency in both first (L1) and second (L2) languages. This paper explains what extensive reading is, why it is important, and…

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…

Despite empirical evidence from research showing that the use of text-picture combination is beneficial for second language (L2) learning, little is known about the effectiveness of reading comic books for incidental vocabulary acquisition. This study investigated the effects of engaging with comic books on incidental learning of L2 Italian…

In this article, Charlie Taylor offers a commentary on Yang et al.'s 2021 "Reading in a Foreign Language" article, "Text Difficulty in Extensive Reading: Reading Comprehension and Reading Motivation." In their study, Yang et al. analyzed the effects of text difficulty on the reading comprehension and motivation of high school…

This paper presents a novel methodology to determine textbook readability. The method mainly relies on students' lexical coverage to determine the readability level of textbooks, taking into consideration that readability depends primarily on vocabulary knowledge and that it is a function of lexical coverage in teaching English as a Foreign…

In the late 1980s Batia Laufer worked with teachers who believed that to understand a text it was enough to understand 80% of the text's word tokens. In response, Laufer set out to calculate the minimal text coverage, i.e., percentage of running words in a text the reader should understand to comprehend it reasonably well. In 1992, she explored…

Metadiscourse is a tool for writers to guide and interact with readers through texts. Yet in most student texts, one of the points lacking is the interaction between writers and readers. In this study, frequency and type of interactive and interactional metadiscourse features were explored via students' research-based essays based on Hyland's…

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…

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…

The effects of a voluntary summer reading intervention with and without a parent training component were evaluated with a sample of low-income Latino children from language minority families. During the last month of 4th grade, 370 children were pretested on a measure of reading comprehension and vocabulary and were randomly assigned to (a) a…