Volume 32, No. 2
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ItemNewsela: A Level-Adaptive App to Improve Reading Ability(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2020-10-15)
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ItemReadings on L2 reading: Publications in other venues 2019-2020(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2020-10-15)
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ItemThe Incidental Learning of L2 Chinese Vocabulary through Reading(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2020-10-15)The study investigated the effect of marginal glossing and frequency of occurrence on the incidental learning of six aspects of vocabulary knowledge through reading in the second language (L2) Chinese. Participants were 30 intermediate L2 Chinese learners in an American public university. The MACOVA tests indicated that the treatment group who read with marginal glossing significantly outperformed (F = 6.686, p < 0.01) the control group who did not read with marginal glossing on six aspects of vocabulary knowledge after reading two stories. Significant differences were found on receptive word form, productive word form, receptive word meaning, and productive word grammatical function. The two-way ANOVA test suggested that the treatment group performed consistently better on learning words repeated three times and one time, and there was no interaction between the groups and the frequency of occurrence the words. The findings indicated that reading interesting and comprehensible Chinese stories can be beneficial for the learning of Chinese words.
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ItemOral Reading Miscues and Reading Comprehension by Chinese L2 Learners(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2020-10-15)This study investigated types of oral reading miscues and their relationship with silent reading comprehension among college-level Chinese as a second language (L2) learners, as well as these students’ perspectives toward classroom oral reading practice, at three U.S. universities. Altogether, 80 students were selected randomly to participate in the study. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of data showed that first- through fourth-year students committed four categories of miscues while orally reading instructional-level material: orthographic, syntactic, semantic, and word-knowledge-based. Three of the four categories negatively correlate with silent reading comprehension. A survey of students at beginner and advanced levels showed that students at both levels view oral reading practice as important and helpful for improving their reading comprehension. Lower-level students prefer methods focused more on facilitating accurate character and word recognition, while advanced learners prefer methods that stress text comprehension and have oral reading integrated with other creative learning activities.
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ItemHarry Potter and the Prisoners of Vocabulary Instruction: Acquiring Academic Language at Hogwarts(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2020-10-15)Several researchers have claimed that low-achieving students, especially second language students, need explicit academic vocabulary instruction to “catch up” with their age peers (e.g., Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Two possible paths to vocabulary growth – free reading and explicit vocabulary instruction – were compared in terms of their efficiency (Mason, 2007) in words acquired per minute by analyzing data from a large corpus (1.1 million words) of young-adult novels taken from the Harry Potter series (Rowling, 2016), and from seven large-scale academic vocabulary intervention studies. The Harry Potter novels contain 85% of all the words on the Academic Word List (AWL), which is thought to include the most important word families needed for success in school. Reading all seven Harry Potter novels is predicted to result in the acquisition of between one-fifth and one-half of these AWL words. This vocabulary gain is 1.6 to four times more efficient than what has been achieved so far through explicit instruction.
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ItemEffect of timed reading on Chinese undergraduates’ EFL reading rates: Mixed-method analyses(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2020-10-15)In this article, a three-phase mixed-methods study was conducted to investigate timed reading effects on Chinese university students’ English as a foreign language (EFL) reading rate. First, two equivalent reading rate tests were designed and validated with 30 participants. Second, 81 university students from two intact classes participated in the main study. Quantitative analyses revealed that the timed reading group made significantly greater improvement in reading rate than the comparison group, while both groups progressed significantly in reading rate. Third, semi-structured interviews with 14 participants from the treatment group were conducted to investigate students’ perceptions of the effects of the timed reading approach. Despite some positive comments, some negative effects were identified. The findings shed new light on the implementation of timed reading instructions.
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ItemAnalyzing the patterns of lexico-grammatical complexity across Graded Reader levels(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2020-10-15)This study investigates the development of lexico-grammatical complexity in two levels of graded readers, beginner and intermediate. Using the linguistic features described in Biber et al. (2011), 58 graded readers were analyzed. Biber et al. (2011) proposed a lexico-grammatical developmental sequence based on empirical research. In this study, 11 of these grammatical features were counted in these two levels of graded readers. The graded reader corpus was tagged for the lexico-grammatical features, and a Mann-Whitney U test was conducted to account for the differences between graded readers’ levels. The results of the statistical analysis suggest that beginner graded readers have more advanced features of complexity than intermediate graded readers. Nevertheless, after close analysis of text excerpts, it is clear that this is a result of the register being investigated, with intermediate graded readers having more features of conversation than beginner graded readers.
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ItemForeign Language Reading Anxiety in the Saudi Tertiary EFL Context(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2020-10-15)Foreign language (FL) reading is a persistent problem among many learners. This preliminary study investigates FL reading anxiety among students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) at the tertiary level, employing Saito et al.’s (1999) Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) and a background information questionnaire. A total of 225 students enrolled in general English courses at two Saudi universities participated in the study. Results indicated that female participants exhibited higher levels of anxiety than their male counterparts. An exploratory factor analysis revealed three domains of student concern in Saudi university contexts: worry about comprehension, lack of satisfaction with one’s reading ability, and unfamiliarity with certain phonics rules. Results also showed that background variables (i.e., experience abroad, knowledge of a third language) and self-perceived proficiency in English reading played a significant role in predicting FL levels of reading anxiety. Implications for foreign language teaching strategies are discussed.
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ItemFrom the Editors(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2020-10-15)