This study aimed to examine whether overall English proficiency influences the relative predictive power of reading fluency and listening comprehension abilities in explaining the reading comprehension of Korean EFL learners within the simple view of reading framework, when the age factor is controlled for. One hundred sixteen eleventh-grade Korean high school students consisting of two highly distinct groups in general English proficiency―55 Most Highly Capable Students (MHCS) and 61 Capable Students (CS)―were tested on measures of reading fluency, vocabulary knowledge, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension. The findings indicated that reading fluency and listening comprehension abilities were significantly related to the reading comprehension of both MHCS and CS groups. However, the results from a series of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that while listening comprehension was a stronger predictor of reading comprehension of the MHCS group, it was reading fluency that explained more variance in comprehension of the CS group. Implications for reading instructions are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to examine how reading motivation varies in its prediction of reading comprehension in Korean (L1) and English (L2) (with parental involvement being controlled for), and how reading motivation in each language is associated with language proficiency. Participants consisted of 289 EFL middle school students in South Korea. Three questionnaires and four language tests were employed to measure learners' reading motivation, parental involvement, language proficiency, and reading comprehension in their L1 and L2. Results indicated that L2 reading performance was positively predicted by both intrinsic motivation and grades/utility, whereas the only positive predictor of L1 reading comprehension was intrinsic motivation. Moreover, in both L1 and L2, the high-proficiency group was found to exhibit significantly stronger intrinsic and extrinsic motivation than the low group; the high group's intrinsic motivation was significantly stronger than the middle group; and the middle and low groups differed significantly in extrinsic motivation.

The aim of the present study was to examine factors affecting Korean university EFL learners' English reading comprehension across two reading tasks (i.e., literal vs. inferential reading). To this end, five latent factors (linguistic, cognitive, affective, social, and English reading) were targeted, and the structural relationships among these five factors were analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. Results of the present study demonstrate that for literal reading comprehension task, linguistic, cognitive, and social factors made a significant and direct impact on Korean university students' English reading performances, whereas the effect of affective factor was not significant. Regarding the inferential reading task, only linguistic and cognitive factors were significantly and positively associated with Korean university students' English reading comprehension. Implications for pedagogy as well as for future research directions were also provided.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between prosody and reading comprehension of elementary school students in Korea. To achieve the purpose of the study, 114 fifth and sixth graders were selected from three schools of Seoul city and Gyeonggi province, and their prosody, word recognition and comprehension were assessed. In order to measure their prosody, students were asked to read a reading text orally for one minute, and the teacher checked their reading rate, decoding accuracy, and prosody. Students’ prosody was measured through Clay and Imlach’s (1971) method. The results of this study showed that while most students gained higher score in word recognition and reading rate, their prosodic features was found comparatively weak. It also revealed a correlation between the three sub-categories of prosody and reading comprehension. Based on the results of this study, it could be concluded that prosodic reading features of Korean EFL students have co-relations with comprehension, even if their prosodic feature is weak. Finally some ideas for enhancing prosody in L2 students’ reading instruction were suggested.

Despite the general understanding of the prominent role of basic reading sub-skills, such as decoding abilities and reading fluency, in the reading comprehension of younger and proficient first and second language readers, little is known about the role of these skills in older and less skilled readers in foreign language contexts. The present study was designed to investigate how decoding skills and reading fluency relate to the reading comprehension of such readers, and to identify the relative strengths between the two. Two hundred twenty two Korean high school students participated, and their performance on decoding, reading fluency, and reading comprehension tasks was analyzed. The results showed that both decoding skills and reading fluency were strongly correlated to reading comprehension. Moreover, between the two fundamental reading sub-skills, decoding skills outperformed reading fluency in explaining reading comprehension, making a unique contribution beyond the effects of reading fluency. These findings suggest that a basic skill like word decoding still deserves instructional attention even at the secondary schools in EFL contexts.

The purpose of the current study was to explore the effects of background knowledge, time pressure, and involvement on reading comprehension. One hundred and twenty college students read three passages and answered comprehension questions in eight different experimental conditions: activated vs inactivated background knowledge, with vs without time pressure, and high vs low involvement. The results showed main effects of background knowledge and involvement on reading comprehension, indicating essential roles of background knowledge in facilitating the processes of reading comprehension in Korea’s EFL educational contexts. In addition, the study found an interaction effect of background knowledge and time pressure on reading comprehension. Pedagogical implications are suggested.

Despite a large amount of research on reading, little attention has been paid to experimental studies on the effects of purposeful reading. This study explored the effects of reading purpose on reading comprehension and perceived difficulty. 71 high school students participated in this study and were randomly assigned to three groups – graphic organizer (Purpose 1), key sentence (Purpose 2), and control. The learners’ reading comprehension was measured through pre-, post- and delayed tests. The participants’ perceived difficulty for the texts was also checked with a sevenpoint Likert scale. The result demonstrates no immediate effect of establishing reading purpose, though immediate reading purpose effects might be found if a longer treatment period is set. The results also reveal the sustained effect of reading purpose on reading comprehension. In perceived text difficulty, the Purpose 1 group found the reading passages the easiest among the three groups. This suggests that learners establishing a reading purpose can gain greater ease in reading than those without a reading purpose.

This study attempted to investigate the relative contribution of vocabulary and grammatical knowledge to second language reading comprehension ability. With 44 EFL adult learners whose language proficiency fell within the low-intermediate level, three different measures were conducted: vocabulary and grammatical knowledge were measured by researcher-developed tests and L2 reading comprehension was measured using the reading section of the TOEIC test. In order to examine the two predicting variables (i.e., vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) a multiple regression analysis was performed. The study found that both grammatical and vocabulary knowledge related significantly to L2 reading comprehension. Additionally, vocabulary knowledge showed a slightly stronger contribution to reading comprehension than syntactic knowledge. These findings suggest that it is equally important for lower level readers to understand vocabulary as well as basic syntactic rules and structures when it comes to EFL reading comprehension.

A study was conducted to investigate the levels of representation in memory constructed as an outcome of L2 reading comprehension, and the effects of L2 proficiency, prior knowledge, and L1 reading skills on the construction of the representation. A total number of 128 Korean EFL learners participated in the study. Their L2 reading comprehension was tested through verification measure and comprehension questions designed to assess different levels of understanding including the sentence-level, textbase understanding and the situation model, or the deeper level of understanding of what the text is about. Results showed that the representation the L2 readers constructed was characterized as consisting of rather loose textbase understanding and relatively weak, but varying degrees of, situational understanding. Only L2 proficiency, among the three factors, appeared to have a significant effect on the levels of understanding in the representation the L2 readers constructed.

The aim of the present study is to explore the relative contribution of working memory capacity to second language reading comprehension of Korean college students in comparison with L1 reading comprehension ability, L2 vocabulary knowledge, and L2 grammatical knowledge. Further, it attempts to examine whether the role played by working memory span differs depending on the proficiency levels of L2 learners. The study was conducted with 78 L2 learners of English who were classified into two different groups―a low-proficiency and a high-proficiency group—according to their English proficiency levels. The results of a step-wise multiple regression analysis revealed that working memory capacity made a significant contribution to L2 reading comprehension of advanced users of English above and beyond other variables; working memory capacity alone explained around 37.9% of the variance in L2 reading comprehension. However, for the low-proficiency group, vocabulary knowledge explained a larger variance in L2 reading comprehension. The findings from the study suggest that as L2 learners become more competent users of English, working memory span emerges as a more direct predictor of L2 reading comprehension.

In this article, we have examined the studies on the reading competence in the context of French as a foreign language. The goal of this study originated from the observation that the pedagogy in Korea focuses on the linguistic and socio-cultural competences of learners. However, this teaching method would not adequately enable learners to read efficiently, nor to become autonomous readers in French. In order to better understand the reading competence, we have proposed to consider the text in which reading activities take place as a semiotic and linguistic object and as a discourse. We have adopted the "l'ordre du scriptural" and the "l'aire scripturale" according to the theory of J. Peytard. From this perspective, we have examined a text used in the reading comprehension part of DELF, level B1. Our study indicates that reading activity is the communication between the writer and the reader, and requires the reading competence, which the communicative competence of which all components also involved. Thus, we have proposed that it is necessary to teach reading in terms of characteristics of the text which concerns the "l'ordre du scriptural" according to M. Dabène.

Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of visual input enhancement (VIE) of target forms and deliberate attention on grammar learning and reading comprehension of Korean high school students. In Experiment 1, eighty-eight students read one of the three experimental texts: (i) BT (baseline text), (ii) VIE (BT with the target forms visually enhanced), and (iii) VIE-Attention (VIE with explicit instruction asking students to pay deliberate attention to both the target forms and reading comprehension). After reading, the students responded to grammar and reading comprehension tests. The results showed that only VIE-Attention promoted grammar learning, while both the VIE and VIE-Attention significantly impaired reading comprehension. In Experiment 2, an eye tracker was used in order to further probe the effects of VIE and deliberate attention. The results revealed that the VIE and VIEAttention groups fixated longer and more often than those in the BT group and that the VIE and VIE-Attention groups performed better in the grammar test and poorer on the reading comprehension test than the BT group. The present study makes significant contributions to the VIE literature since it provides the first eye movement data elucidating the effects of VIE.

This study examined whether vocabulary knowledge has meaningful effects on reading comprehension of Korean high school EFL learners and investigated which specific type of vocabulary knowledge, between vocabulary breadth and depth, plays a bigger role in reading comprehension when the learners’ English language proficiency is taken into account. The participants of this study were ninety eight high school EFL learners in Seoul, Korea, and they were tested on a series of measures tapping on their reading comprehension abilities and vocabulary knowledge in two different dimensions (vocabulary breadth and depth). Their listening comprehension abilities were also measured in order to control for the effects of general oral language comprehension abilities known to be the foremost contributor to reading comprehension and thus to enable focused analysis of the role of vocabulary knowledge. The study findings revealed that 1) vocabulary knowledge itself played a critical role in predicting reading comprehension abilities even after controlling for their listening comprehension abilities and that 2) compared to vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth played a relatively more important role in predicting reading comprehension, regardless of the learners’ language proficiency. The findings provide important implications for vocabulary and reading comprehension instructions for Korean EFL students.

This study examined how four different constructed response formats of reading comprehension tests (cloze, recall, summary, and translation), developed based on the two texts with different reading difficulty, exert effects on EFL students’ reading test performance; and also investigated how those effects, if any, are differentiated with respect to the participants’ language proficiency levels. The total of 437 college students (220 male and 217 female students) participated in the current study. The test data was submitted to statistical treatment. The findings were that the four different response formats assessed different aspects of reading comprehension; the two texts with different text difficulty elicited different reading comprehension performance; and there were complicated interactions between the two variables of response format and text difficulty across the participants’ language proficiency levels. It is suggested that classroom teachers have to take it into consideration when planning to develop a reading comprehension test for EFL learners: how to choose reading texts that will be included in the test, considering an appropriate level of text difficulty and test formats to be engaged in order to assess students’ reading comprehension ability more accurately.

This study investigated whether the simple view of reading framework is supported among Upper elementary Korean EFL learners. Specifically, the relative contributive power of two emergent literacy factors, word decoding and linguistic comprehension abilities, which have been identified as the main determinants of successful reading comprehension, was examined. Ninety nine fifth grade students in Korean elementary school participated in this research, and their decoding skills, listening comprehension abilities, and reading comprehension in English were measured. The findings revealed that both English decoding skills and linguistic comprehension ability were significant predictors of their English reading comprehension, which supports the simple view of reading within the Korean EFL context. Specifically, decoding skill explained more of the variance, compared to linguistic comprehension, in reading comprehension when controlling for each other. The result is discussed in terms of the overall development of L2 proficiency and the role of L2 exposure in L2 reading comprehension development.

The research on the role of working memory in L1 and L2 reading comprehension has provided valuable insight on domain-general mechanisms at work in both comprehension processes. The present paper explains a construct of working memory as a multicomponent model (Baddeley, 2007; Baddeley & Hitsch, 1974), reviews empirical studies that investigated the impact of working memory in L1 and L2 reading comprehension, introduces a newly adopted construct to the model of working memory, episodic buffer or long-term working memory (Erricson & Kintsch, 1995), and discusses the role of background knowledge in relation to working memory. The review of the studies showed that central executive, an attentional control system, is a significant predictor for not only L1 reading but also L2 reading comprehension. Phonological loop, a storage system, is significantly related to central executive. However, it is not a direct significant predictor for L1 and L2 reading comprehension; instead, it explains significant variances of vocabulary acquisition in the beginning stage of language acquisition, which is a direct significant predictor for reading comprehension. How high vs. low working memory groups make use of their cognitive resources in L1 and L2 reading when provided with additional background knowledge is further discussed.

Substantial studies on the relationships between reading comprehension and reading strategy use of ESL/EFL learners have been reported. However, the results of the studies were inconsistent and hardly conclusive. This study was purposed to show stable estimates of the relationships and also to investigate whether certain variables, such as language context, L1 or native culture, grade level, measure for reading comprehension, and research design, make differences in the relationships. In order to fulfill thc purpose, the present study meta-analyzed 18 unique studies previously conducted on thc relationships. This meta-analysis showed that there was a significant positive conducted between reading comprehension and reading strategy use of the ESL/EFL learners, and the correlation was medium. Of the moderating variables examined. thc four variables. except for thc research desi후 made a statistically significant difference in the relationships. The findings are discussed and implications for research and pedagogy are suggested. (146)

This study compares the differences between a multiple-choice (MC) and an open-ended (OE) reading comprehension test in a within-subject design to investigate test validity by comparing the two methods. A total of 70 Korean undergraduates participated in the present study. After taking a cloze test, participants read a passage, returned it and took two types of reading comprehension tests. Results showed that there was a statistical difference between the two test methods in a within-subjects design, which agrees with previous between-subjects studies. The higher scores on the MC format were attributed to three reasons: memory constraint, the nature of the task, and test-taking strategy. Further analysis indicated that both proficiency level groups were significantly affected by the test methods. Moreover, both the MC and OE tests significantly separated the two proficiency levels. Information from a survey provides more information regarding differences between the two test methods.