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Extensive reading and creative practices

In line with the objective of this study, which was to investigate the impact of extensive reading practices on the language learning and self confidence development of students in the Department of Foreign Language at Atilim University, various conclusions can be extracted. To begin with, it can be concluded that extensive reading practice can be applied in all levels of language teaching and learning. To put it another way, there is no need to hesitate in applying this practice in elementary groups. The only issue to be considered here is to arrange the level of the extensive reading material. However, through the feedbacks taken from the students of elementary groups, it can be asserted that in heterogeneous groups, it would be more logical to provide a chance for the students whose enthusiasm for reading is more. Thus, the range of stories chosen for this group should be revised, and also applying the same system of assessing their language level (using oxford reading test) before assigning extensive reading practices would be the most practical and encouraging way.

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Elementary EFL Teachers’ Familiarity with Reading Strategies

In a nutshell, the central pattern identified in this study is that teachers fail to instruct students in using and coordinating cognitive processes, such as comprehension strategies in order to construct meaning from EFL written texts, despite the bulk of research on the contribution of strategy instruction to comprehension achievement. Although students were given some opportunities to practise reading strategies there was no evidence that they were being taught the active comprehension processes validated in the reading research.

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The Effects of Test Anxiety on Learners’ Reading Test

Performance

The findings of the study indicated that the foreign language reading anxiety (FLRAS) did not have any significant correlation with the first reading comprehension test scores in the second session of the study and also with the second reading comprehension test scores in the third session of the study. Besides, the findings revealed that no significant correlation existed between general test anxiety (TAS) and first reading comprehension test scores in the second session of the study and also between general test anxiety (TAS) and second reading

comprehension test scores in the third session of the study. Therefore, it can be concluded that test-taking anxiety had no significant correlation with reading test performance. In other words, test anxiety had no significant effect on Iranian EFL learners’ reading test performance at intermediate level.

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The Effectiveness of Teaching English by Using Reading Aloud

technique towards EFL Beginners

Even though students are in university level but teacher’s reading aloud technique could be a great benefit for learners who use English as a foreign language and also for the beginners. The students had different study background and potential to learn foreign language in primary to secondary school, so this made students diverse in learning English in university level. The result found that reading aloud boosted the students to have more selfconfidence

to pronounce the different or unfamiliar words and it could build up potential for students to memorize words as researcher observed in class and in test paper on how students explain and answer the questions. For selfdirected learning, after observed in class and test paper, the result showed that students who are fast learners tended to understand context faster than beginners in term of writing, and answer the questions according to the reading comprehension. But slow learners seemed unable to engage the context or caught up with what others performed in class. In addition, learners with only a basic level of proficiency in English have a better understanding of what they are reading in a teacher reading aloud situation than in a silent reading situation. Besides, a systematic approach to reading aloud can yield important academic benefits for children, it gained a new level of emphasis

which was called “the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading”. Not only increase students’ ability in reading but this technique also increases students’ listening comprehension skill (Morrow et al, 2002). The development of students’ abilities in term of reading comprehension is required both reading aloud technique and motivation. Thus, a teacher takes the important role to fulfill students’ success. With this interesting technique, students will be able to catch up the topic, articles, and some difficult vocabulary since students have been engaged in reading aloud technique; furthermore, this teaching provokes students to perceive and understand the content and analyze the topic provided. Of course the technique will be easily applied for all subjects both in bilingual school and university including in all students’level.

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Effect of Extensive Reading on Incidental Vocabulary Retention

1. It can provide 'comprehensible input'

2. It can enhance learners' general language competence

3. It increases the students' exposure to the language

4. It can increase knowledge of vocabulary

5. It can lead to improvement in writing

6. It can motivate learners to read

7. It can consolidate previously learned language

8. It helps to build confidence with extended texts

9. It encourages the exploitation of textual redundancy

10. It facilitates the development of prediction skills

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Using short Stories in Reading Skills Class

The students reported that studying short stories broadens their perspectives for the events

they have never experienced before. They provide them with a better understanding for different behavior. Moreover, it helps them develop empathy with and a better understanding for the people in different situations and behaviors. As the results suggest, studying short stories enables them to think about the reasons rather than the result. They show them different life styles and provide them with a comparison between their own culture and other cultures while teaching them ethical and moral values of other culture and making them more tolerant. The results also demonstrate that short stories increase their understanding about the personal relations. The students reported that stories have increased their appreciation for literature, thus they wish to read more short stories.

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Variations in the neurobiology of reading in children and adolescents

born full term and preterm

This study found that FA of segments within several white matter tracts of the brain (aSLF, Arc, CST, and UF)was associatedwith decoding and comprehension in children born full term and preterm. However, the direction of the association was different in the two groups and found in different segments ofwhitematter tracts. These results suggest that different neurobiological factors or a different balance of neurobiological factors are associated with reading in the two groups. White matter diffusion properties represent a complex interaction of biological and experiential forces. The children born preterm may have experienced

injury and subsequent dysmaturity to theirwhitematter. The dynamic forces sculpting their white matter beyond the newborn period, by necessity, would take different forms from the forces at play within full term healthy individuals. The children born preterm in this study

were nonetheless able to develop reading skills that were comparable to full term peers on standardized testing.

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Repeated reading effect on reading fluency and reading

comprehension in monolingual and bilingual EFL learners

This report describes an 8-week quasi-experimental RR study carried out with monolingual and bilingual university level Iranian learners of English using improved reading comprehension testing procedures. It was found that RR in general was effective in increasing reading fluency and comprehension among experimental group in comparison with control group which does not receive any reading treatment. This finding is not in line with other previous studied which have failed to report reading comprehension gains from repeated reading. Since repetition is a critical element in RR method, experimental group take more advantage of this element, during post-test and comprehend more than control group. The significant finding of this study is that bilinguals gain better comprehension ability than monolinguals but concerning fluency no specific differences were found between monolinguals and bilinguals performances. So it is logical to posit this fact that in FL setting RR is an effective method to help readers especially bilinguals to become independent.

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Children's ability to learn a motor skill is related to handwriting and

reading proficiency

In the current study, 5- to 8-year-old children's handwriting and reading were associated with the production of the ILT, a simple, graphomotor skill learning task. In Phase I of the current study, children's handwriting (speed and legibility) was assessed contemporaneously with the

ILT. The following year, Phase II assessed both handwriting and reading speed. The findings clearly indicate that the performance of the ILT showed strong associations to handwriting and reading. The ILT averaged accuracy score was associated with handwriting legibility, assessed contemporaneously with the ILT, beyond age, SES, and visual-motor skills All four ILT speed-performance measurements were associated with contemporaneous handwriting speed, as well as with handwriting- and reading-speed assessed in the following year, beyond age and SES. Of the four ILT speed-performance measurements, 24 h post-training measurement made the largest associations. While age and SES contributed 60%–70% to the handwriting- and reading speed variance, an additional 10% (or larger) contribution was made by successive ILT speedmeasurements. Finally, the association between ILT speed-performance measurements and following year handwriting speed was mediated by reading speed assessed contemporaneous with handwriting speed.We suggest that the results reflect the role of the underlying procedural learning mechanism in handwriting and reading, as assessed using the ILT.

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Simplification of Arabic Masterpieces for Extensive Reading: A Project Overview

In this paper, we presented an overview of SAMER, a readability simplification project for Arabic fiction. SAMER uses state-of-the-art Arabic NLP processing tools and machine learning classification to develop a graded reader scale and a suite of computational tools to guide human editors in simplifying Arabic works of fiction to levels suitable for younger age groups. We believe this can help bring some much-needed attention to the importance of reading in learning, and to the lack of standards in reading-content creation for Arabic, even less so for specific genres (fiction, novels and short stories) or for targeted readerships (young adults, pre-teens and children). Simplified literature is more accessible to demographics with lower literacy rates, or with no access to schooling due to economic or social conditions. Thus by providing a frame of reference for adapting and creating simplified readings, in addition to a suite of computational tools to facilitate the process, publishing efforts in the Arab world could grow considerably to meet this demand. Furthermore, by generating a sizeable grade-labelled curricular corpus and a fiction corpus of original and simplified novels, we hope to garner more interest from the research community to develop similar educational resources for Arabic. The project just finished its first year of two. Further details will be presented in future publications.

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A qualitative study based on the reading-life histories of future

teachers

Extrapolating these data and findings to other studies conducted to explore the reading itineraries of trainee teachers, regardless of whether they are primary or secondary school teachers, helps us to establish their reader profile, which offers a complicated but challenging panorama. In contrast to what was believed, many of the future mediators are not expert or competent readers. The self-image of their itinerary as readers (childhood, adolescence and adulthood) affords us a retrospective look that can help them build their own identity as

readers. As we said earlier the results are not positive, in fact quite to the contrary, and they reveal an important precariousness in the future teachers' backgrounds as readers. But this has to make us question the early,processes of teacher training as a possible means to reach success in their future mediation in reading.What it does show in a convincing manner, however, is the difference that exists in the ways of assessing reading, literature, how it is taught, children’s and teenagers’ literature or the differences in the attitudes of an avid reader and a reader as future mediators. There is an extremely varied universe between the attitude of the former and that of the latter. For this reason, it is necessary to point out, as has already done by others, that the personal reading and literary identity of a teacher has a profound effect on his or her role as a reading mediator.Summing up the data and the information that we have commented on above, future teachers’ experience as readers, as well as their capacity to make contact with literary texts in the classroom more dynamic, are some of the new challenges looming on the horizon and which researchers in literary education will have to get to grips with.

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Metacognition and reading: Investigating intervention and

comprehension of EFL freshmen in Turkey

The results reveal that METARESTRAP accelerates Turkish young adult university EFL learners’ reading comprehension by providing awareness of metacognition along with declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge about metacognitive reading strategies. METARESTRAP promoted learners’ self-reported metacognitive reading strategy use while conventional reading instruction did not affect it. This may imply that after implementation, readers are able to better control their reading process. First of all, they are aware of the

available metacognitive reading strategies and have a good repertoire of efficient reading strategies from which they can select appropriate ones in relation to their current reading task. Thus, they can better control the process, which in turn results in better reading comprehension due to more effective use of metacognitive reading strategies. In addition to improved control of the reading process, METARESTRAP is also beneficial for achieving better performance in matching type cohesion, coherence, text structure, and global meaning questions. As METARESTRAP encourages readers to pay attention to thematic relationships between paragraphs, readers are better able to realize the flow of ideas in relation to the genre of the text. Thus, they can be regarded as interactive readers who start reading a text having gained a general understanding.

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Child readers’ eye movements in reading Thai

Children use first character frequency early in reading Thai and this is scaffolded by spacing and word frequency. Last character frequency appears to be a later development, and again its use is scaffolded by spacing and word frequency. The increased use of last character frequency over age from 6th to 7th Grade to adulthood may well be a result of the complexity of grapheme-to-phoneme of the last characters in Thai. As the reading skills of the readers increase the ability to use the complex grapheme-to-phoneme mapping rules of the last characters also increases. By adulthood Thai readers are using first and last character

frequencies to guide eye movements to the PVL and optimise viewing patterns. Comparing these results with those of readers of spaced scripts,it appears that the position of the PVL appears to be relatively consistent across alphabetic languages, despite such gross differences

as whether there are spaces between words or not. More generally, it appears that in the absence of spacing between words (and even if there is spacing between words) experienced readers of a scriptio continua script use the relative frequency of boundary characters as

cues for word beginning and ending to guide saccades and allocate fixation time resources. It remains to be seen how this skill might develop in younger readers of Thai. In addition, given that Thai children use character frequency to guide eye movements even when spaces are provided between words opens the possibility that readers of spaced scripts might also use character frequency to guide eye movements but that this is less powerful than spaces, and has not been detected in spaced text reading as it has not been included as a factor in extant studies.

This study provides evidence that young Thai readers use first character frequency to land their eyes at the PVL and use first and last character frequencies to optimise viewing patterns with both of these scaffolded to varying degrees by word frequency and spaces between words. As only relatively older children were tested here (at the end of primary: 6th Grade, and at the start of secondary: 7th Grade) it will be of interest to investigate the relative roles and the interplay of spacing and boundary character frequency on eye movements and fixation patterns in much younger children. This is now possible using head-free, tracking systems. A longitudinal study is now in progress with Thai children testing them first when they are in Grade 1 (where they are taught to read with spaces) and following them through the transition from spaced text in Grade 1 to unspaced text in Grade 2 and beyond. Such investigations will elucidate whether and what developmental role first character frequency in conjunction with word spacing plays in reading development, and the age at which last character frequency also begins to be used as a cue.

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Neural correlates of audiovisual integration in music reading

The current study has implications for our understanding of AV integration in music, specifically the effect of training on the integration of auditory and written music. While both early and late stages of AV integration seem to depend on expertise, the relationship between expertise and early/late integration differs. Early intoprocessing, understanding the visual stimulus helps guide pre-attentive auditory perceptionan dexpectations. Later intoprocessing, there is a super additivecongruency effect, as the P300 is sensitive to both auditory and visual deviants. Training increases the congruency effect, as musicians with more training show larger P300 stocongruent deviants.This suggests that the congruency of the deviants which is meaningful to those with mu- sicaltraining leads to the observed super additivity. Taken  together, continued musical training and experience with musical notation shapes the way the brain processes these abstract sound-symbol pairings, much like the development and mastery of linguistic reading.

aricle review 36

Development of Reading Literacy Based on the Work of Textbooks

(Workbooks)

The research result showed that there is a great choice of textbooks, spelling books, reading books and workbooks for practising of elementary reading and writing. The pedagogues draw from the selection of choice from work material for pupils mainly from the content and didactical view, sufficient range and graphic design. . We consider that these are the right criteria of choice. For the positive aspect and also the aspect of compliance with other subjects and cross-cutting themes. We tried to map the usability of several spelling books, reading books and workbooks of individual publishers. We believe that information from teachers about advantages or disadvantages listed in work materials would help also students – novice teachers in their future practice, in orientation of current textbooks, workbooks for teaching of elementary reading and writing in the Czech Republic. This paper presents results of the Specific Research Project of University of Hradec Kralove number 2112 named: Development of reading literacy based on the work of textbooks and workbooks used in the Czech Republic.

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The Effect Of Bilingualism On The Developing Of English Reading

Skill

This study has practical and theoretical implications in language teaching. The results showed that bilingualism has a positive effect on L3 reading skill. Therefore, this study provides a basis for improving the quality of practices in the teaching of first, second, and third languages’ reading skill. However, the number of the participants of the study was very limited and included just female students and this could affect the result. The study was done

considering one grade of the students, as well, which may affect the results of the study. Further researchers can do this study with more students from different grades with male and female students. It would be better to have more bilingual groups or work on other skills such as speaking, listening, writing, and sub-skills.

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Prospective ELT students’ foreign language reading attitudes and

                                                   motivation                     

The findings of this study show positive attitudes and motivation attribute to the process of self-development of prospective ELT students. Therefore, the practitioners in the field of second language acquisition may lead their students to set some certain goals to improve their reading skill in a foreign language. Teachers might utilize some reading materials from different subject areas to enable students to do more extensive reading. Thus, they can attempt to stimulate their students’ intrinsic motivation more frequently. Finally, the practitioners in the field of second language acquisition can build in some fun and pleasure through/with authentic reading texts in the classroom environment.The present study investigated attitudes and motivation of prospective ELT students to read in a foreign language. The findings support the existence of reading motivation in FL/L2 reading based on four main factors. The results suggest that students have positive attitudes and motivation in foreign language reading correlating with their academic achievement (GPA) without any gender difference.

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Intraoperative local flap transforming (iLoFT) method;

from hachet to reading-man flap

iLoFT method was applied in surgical cases where the donor tension was too strong to close the primary site. The advantages of applying iLoFT are that the additional procedure is simple and the flap tension could be reduced for better vascularity at the flap distal end. The reduction in stress is adjustable, and other flap transformations are possible.

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Measuring reading performance

Improving reading ability is a high priority for patients threatened with the loss of vision. Reading speed is a strong predictor of visual ability and vision-related quality of life. From this, we would expect reading performance to be one of the more important outcome measures for judging the effectiveness of therapeutic and vision rehabilitation. But that is not yet the case. In the century and a half since the introduction of Jaeger’s first clinical reading test, there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of different reading tests. But there is not yet a consensus on the best way to evaluate reading performance, as there is for visual acuity (log-

MAR letter charts) and contrast sensitivity (variable contrast letter charts). But most tests have settled on a set of common features:

1.       reading speed is the key outcome variable, with tests of comprehension or reading endurance reserved for specific research questions,

2.      reading aloud is preferred for ease of scoring,

3.      reading speed is measured for meaningful text even though this may allow greater influence of cognitive factors.

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Reading comprehension intervention program for teachers from 3rd

grade’students

The profile of the 3rd grade in reading comprehension before the implementation of the informative program developed for this study was similar, meaning that not presented significant differences for both performance narrative texts as for the expositive. The intervention program developed for this study was effective for the comprehension narrative texts because to the narrative texts statistically significant differences occurred while these differences did not occur for the expositive texts.