This study aims to present the potential of Participatory Action Research (PAR) to bring together the experiences of teachers and researchers with the intention of improving teaching practices and students' learning outcomes. Participants in the study were 7 teachers, their 160 fifths grade students, and researchers (authors). Teachers and…

This study set out to explore dedicated language learning apps pedagogically while focusing mainly on aspects of second language acquisition. A total of 20 English language learning apps were collected for analysis. The study took one model of analysing course book materials and another, computer-assisted language learning model and combined them…

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…

Purpose: This study reports on the development of an auditory passage comprehension task for Swedish primary school children of cultural and linguistic diversity. It also reports on their performance on the task in quiet and in noise. Method: Eighty-eight children aged 7-9 years and showing normal hearing participated. The children were divided…

This article examines the effects of a reading fluency intervention on the fluency and comprehension of struggling middle school readers. The secondary fluency routine was developed by the first author, and was based on effective practices described in other studies. Thirty-nine seventh and eighth grade students enrolled in reading intervention…

We investigated the contribution of morphological awareness to university students' reading comprehension ability. Although there is considerable evidence that morphological awareness contributes to children's reading ability, there is much less evidence concerning adults; the few studies of adults have not controlled other known predictors of…

The young generation, born into digital technologies and called Millennials or the Y-Generation, are raised in a world where everybody has a computer in their pockets (Hamari et al., 2014), and they are constantly engaged in digital activities. However, research on the impact of digital devices on learners' educational performance and motivation…

This study aimed to test three competing hypotheses concerning the strength of the cross-language relationship in listening comprehension proficiency in emergent bilinguals: Cummins's developmental linguistic interdependence hypothesis, Proctor, August, Snow, and Barr's interdependence continuum hypothesis, and Goodrich, Lonigan, Kleuver, and…

Dialogic reading, in which parents engage children in discussion of books, is associated with long-term literacy success. Social media is an emerging platform for promoting behavioral change, but it has yet to be tested as a platform for engaging parents in use of dialogic reading strategies with their young children. This exploratory study was…

We examined the contribution of rapid automatized naming (RAN) components (articulation time, pause time, and pause time consistency) to reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling in a sample of 257 German children (139 boys, 118 girls; M[subscript age] = 5.60 years, SD = 0.31) followed from kindergarten to Grade 1. In kindergarten,…

In a study of approaches to teaching listening, an experimental group (EG) of seventeen English as a Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduates received genre-based instruction, beginning with a guided analysis of the context of oral production, the language used, the variations and organization of second language (L2) oral texts about films, leading…

This empirical study investigates the effects of different caption modes on the content and vocabulary comprehension by Chinese English learners with different levels of English proficiency. The results show that the full captioned group performed better on content comprehension than the keyword group, while no significant difference was found on…

A common goal of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) is to provide learning environments that adapt to the varying abilities and characteristics of users. This type of adaptivity is possible only if the ITS has information that characterizes the learning behaviors of its users and can adjust its pedagogy accordingly. This study investigated an…

Reading approaches in Japan and other EFL settings have typically focused on accuracy at the expense of fluency. However, reading rate and fluency are important components of reading that are currently being neglected. A review of the literature reveals growing interest in investigating the effectiveness of reading rate and fluency enhancement…

Investigating how visuals affect test takers' performance on video-based L2 listening tests has been the focus of many recent studies. While most existing research has been based on test scores and self-reported verbal data, few studies have examined test takers' viewing behavior (Ockey, 2007; Wagner, 2007, 2010a). To address this gap, in the…