Reading in ESL

Finding an effective instruction mode for ESL students in the US educational system has not been an easy task. The country's secondary and tertiary institutions continue to struggle to meet the needs of their large non-native student populations. The article revisits the debate whether sheltered instruction is an effective model to follow. In our study, a sheltered section of a college-level reading class was more effective in improving students' reading abilities compared to mainstream sections where the international students were mixed with native speakers.

A five day scaffolded lesson plan to cater to the specific needs of English language learners (ELL students).  The lesson plan developed helps build academic English, and strengthen reading comprehension while establishing a collaborative learning environment.

Although a great paucity exists in scholarly studies on education in Somalia, the scarcity is more evident in the English studies area, particularly English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) (used interchangeably in this study), where almost none had existed until Mohamed Eno's MA TESOL Dissertation in 2005 and his recent article in the Journal of Somali Studies in 2017. Influenced by both the paucity and the latter study in 2017 1 , which recommended further examination of ESL/EFL area studies, this research investigates EFL students' perceptions of what they consider as more motivating or most motivating skill among the four second language acquisition (SLA) skills of reading, listening, speaking and writing. 2 Consequently, the results reveal that learners do not perceive more listening as a very motivating factor compared to more speaking, identified as the most motivating skill and ahead of more writing in the overall ratings. With very low results on the whole, more reading, on the other hand, is much below both speaking and writing in significance, though ahead of listening as a potential motivator. Interestingly, the findings also reveal persistent learner misunderstanding of the interlinkedness of the four skills, with a misperception that acquisition of one skill is independent of the others, as captured from an analysis of the vagaries in their responses.

As was the case with many newly independent African nations, Somalia was beset by a language problem whose complexity had begun well before independence and the unification of British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland in 1960. With three languages (English, Arabic, and Italian) used as media of communication in government offices and in schools, various Somali administrations struggled to contain the impasse but found no tangible solution. Barely three years after Mohamed Siad Barre seized power in October 1969, he had his military regime introduce the Somali orthography in the Latin alphabet. Based on this milestone, Siad Barre's military rule is highly commended for taking a remarkable step forward in what came to be known as the Somalization project. However, officials of the government and Somali scholarship failed to

Background. Extensive reading (ER) classes have become a popular way to promote reading in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms because ER supports the idea of reading for pleasure. However, reading in the classroom can still become stale if students have little chance to reflect on what they have read or if they become burdened by the reading requirements.

This paper presents the alarming emerging situations of English language teaching at the senior secondary level of Hindi medium students in Rajasthan. State government schools continue to register negative growth in learning level (reading and comprehension) in this subject from 2006. The Annual Status of Education Report, 2014 tabled in New Delhi by Pratham, an NGO, says that the share of class V government school students who can read class II text, which was 59 % in 2006, has reduced to 39 % in 2014. 46. 7% of class V students cannot read class II text and 19.5 % of class VIII students failed to read class II text. The situation is absolutely worst in the succeeding classes. The data that have been presented directly questions the quality of education in this state. Due to the territorial vastness of the state, 82 % of the total schools here are in rural areas. Let's put a glance on the academic situation of the state in special reference to the teaching English at Senior Secondary level of Hindi medium students and the main reasons responsible for the deterioration of the government schools.

La inexistencia de un cuerpo teórico práctico que apoye al docente universitario de lectura a ser consciente de los aspectos relacionados con la metacognición constituye el problema en esta tesis. Para atenderlo, se planteó el objetivo general: Desarrollar un cuerpo de aportes teóricos con el fin de que estos profesores se conviertan en docentes conscientes de los procesos metacognitivos y los apliquen en su práctica de enseñanza. Los objetivos específicos fueron: (a) Analizar la teoría formal existente sobre la enseñanza de lectura y metacognición. (b) Construir teoría para la enseñanza de lectura en nivel universitario con énfasis en la metacognición. (c) Evaluar la intervención pedagógica en un grupo de docentes de lectura en nivel universitario, utilizando el cuerpo de aportes teóricos obtenido. La Metodología, basada principalmente en investigación cualitativa utilizando observación documental y de campo, consideró referencias previas y entrevistas en profundidad a expertos en enseñanza de lectura. El cuerpo teórico resultante está constituido por dos modelos: (1) Formación y actualización docente en enseñanza de lectura en lengua extranjera y (2) Enseñanza de lectura y metacognición. Estos modelos se evaluaron en un curso dirigido a profesores, quienes reportaron cambio “sustancial” y modificaron su concepción del proceso de aprendizaje. Además, considerando la complementariedad paradigmática, se observó cambio en pre y post tests. Se coincide con Martín (1999) y L'Allier y Elish-Piper (2007) sobre la formación del profesor basada en la construcción conjunta, a largo plazo, dirigida por datos de docentes y estudiantes discutidos abiertamente en sesiones de apoyo en el contexto del trabajo del profesor. Estos aportes son importantes para administradores y docentes porque se pueden mejorar los procesos de mediación en programas de lectura universitaria en lenguas extranjeras y permiten disminuir los esfuerzos de auto-formación del profesor de reciente ingreso o sin experiencia y redundan en el aprendizaje de la lectura por parte de estudiantes.

Palabras Clave: Enseñanza, Aprendizaje, Lectura, Metacognición, Estrategias.

This study investigates students‘ perceptions of learning English as a Second Language (ESL). Specifically, it aims to obtain students‘ views of what they consider as their areas of weakness among the four communication skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening. It also seeks to understand their perceptions concerning the quality of the instructional material they use in the ESL class and the method of teaching they experience during the teaching/learning sessions. The findings reveal the existence of potential areas of weakness, some of which the learners are consciously aware of and others which they are unaware of—but which require appropriate solution in order to
facilitate effective learning. In addition to the identification of the learners‘ areas of weakness, the study attempts to highlight possible causes of the problems and provides suggestions for further studies in order to tackle the predicament.

Over the last four decades, there has been a substantial body of research on metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. However, very few studies have focused on stage-wise frequency (pre-, while-and post-reading) and conditional knowledge of reading strategies. The purpose of this paper is to report stage-wise frequency and conditional knowledge of reading strategies as employed by nine ninth-grade participants. The participants were asked to maintain Reflective Journals, which were analyzed qualitatively using thematic analysis. The analysis revealed that the most frequently used strategies are 'previewing', 'underlining unfamiliar words', 're-reading difficult sentences' and 'recalling summary'. Reading strategies were employed for a variety of purposes such as predicting the main idea, solving the problems faced in comprehending the text, memorizing useful information and learning English vocabulary. The stage of reading was found to be significantly influencing both frequency and purpose of reading strategies. The findings of this study have implications for learners, teachers and course book designers in teaching English as a Second Language.

The present article reports on a study investigating the interaction of a reading comprehension test with gender in a formal testing context and the performance of males and females on reading test items with regard to demands on strategy use. Participants were 187 (59=female and 128=male) international students ranging from 17 to 20 years of age studying English at the intermediate level, at The School of Foreign Languages in North Cyprus. Three reading comprehension passages with 25 questions were given to the participants as the final exam of the course. Two of the texts according to Bügel and Buunk’s (1996) classification had male topics and one had a neutral topic. The questions on these passages tapped different information and each question required the students to interact with the reading passages in a different way. The questions given to students were classified into 6 categories: identifying main idea, reading for specific information, guessing meaning from context, identifying referential information, matching titles with paragraph, and text coherence. The findings of the study suggest that males and females perform differently on different items. Females scored higher on identifying main idea, guessing meaning from context, and text coherence questions. Conversely, males outperformed females in reading for specific information, identifying referential information, and matching titles with paragraph. However, gender affected item performance in only two cases: guessing meaning from context, and text coherence in favor of the females. Nonetheless, the overall performance of males and females on the reading test was not significantly different which implies that text topic did not influence male and female performance on the reading comprehension test. The article discusses the findings and explores classroom implications.

An analysis, verification, and proposed solutions to troublesome areas in writing for English language learners (ELL students).  There are a total of 30 exercises, with accompanying resources, to aid in teaching ELL students how to effectively build a foundation of writing skills by scaffolded methods, differentiated teaching methods, and individualized intervention plans.

This article discusses a study on the roles of family involvement and school influence in the formation of reading habits of Qatari secondary education students. Information for the study was gathered from surveys of Qatari high school graduates entering North American colleges in Doha, Qatar. The data showed links between reading extensively and confidence in reading, between being read to and forming the habit of free voluntary reading, and between parental recreational reading and that of their children. Based on their findings, the authors propose practical solutions for educators and education policy makers that would improve the reading literacy of Qataris and contribute to building a knowledge-based economy in their country.

When learners can comprehend 98% or more of the tokens within a text, the lexical difficulty of the text is unlikely to inhibit reading comprehension (Schmitt et al., 2011). This phenomenon will be referred to as the Coverage Comprehension Model (CCM). The CCM is present in countless articles that describe the percentage of tokens necessary to comprehend reading materials (e.g., Nation, 2006). Further, numerous studies operationalize the CCM to provide evidence that participants were able to comprehend reading materials (e.g., Feng & Webb, 2020) by estimating (a) the lexical difficulty of a text and (b) the lexical mastery level of a learner. However, the validity with which the CCM is operationalized is limited by the following four assumptions; (a) 26 out of 30 words on a levels test is an appropriate threshold for mastery of a 1,000-word band; (b) the word counting unit used when estimating the lexical difficulty of a text and the lexical ability of a learner is appropriate for the target learners; (c) the item format used in levels tests can appropriately capture the type of vocabulary knowledge necessary when reading; and (d) the number of items on a vocabulary levels test accurately represents the difficulty of the 1,000-word band. This paper applies the findings of research to evaluate the validity of the first two assumptions, and concludes that the validity with which the CCM is operationalized in research is limited.

The use of students' mother tongue (L1) in teaching ESL is an ongoing concern among ESL teachers especially in the rural schools. Since English is considered as a foreign language among many rural primary school students, the use of the L1 is still considered debatable in the context of teaching English among teachers. This research aims to identify ESL teachers' beliefs on the use of L1 in teaching rural primary school students. The results could provide information on what teachers believe and practice in their own teaching of the language. The research surveyed 26 teachers using a 23 items Likert scale questionnaire. The results showed that the teachers believe that students' L1 should be used in teaching English to rural primary school students. Teachers admit that sometimes they too resort to the L1 in the classroom. However, the teachers emphasized that the students should speak English especially when working in groups, however they think that using L1 can contribute to English Language learning. The research also revealed that teachers who teach English in rural primary schools need a strong support from the administrators to enable teachers to teach successfully the English language to young learners.

Cognitive load theory has been utilized by second language acquisition (SLA) researchers to account for differences in learner performance with regards to different learning tasks. Certain instructional designs were shown to have an impact on cognitive load and working memory, and this impact was found to be accentuated in a multimedia environment where there is a variety of interacting elements and tools that can lead to cognitive overload and consequently reduced learning outcomes. This study investigated the influence of split-attention and integrated instructional formats on students’ cognitive load and how they might facilitate second language online reading and vocabulary learning. Twenty English as a Second Language (ESL) intermediate students studying at an Australian language institution were randomly assigned to four conditions: SAND (Split-Attention No Dictionary), SAOD (Split-Attention with Online Dictionary), IFND (Integrated Format No Dictionary), and IFOD (Integrated ...

According to the report in New Straits Times, in the era of 4IR, learners' role in learning has been diversified from passive absorption of information to active creation of knowledge among peers. Among some of the motivating factors for learning among generation z students is the incorporation of social dimensions. Learning is best done among peers. The theory of situated learning describes learning as requiring the content, context, community of practice and participation. The teaching of ESL reading in the academic context can be constructed to enable social interaction among learners. This study looks into the use of class discussions in the ESL academic writing class. Participants for this study are students who registered for English for academic reading course. The instrument used in this study is a questionnaire. The questionnaire has 5 sections; section A looks at the demographic profile, section B looks at Context, section C looks at Content, Section D looks at Community and Section E looks at 22 Participation. Data obtained is analyzed to show frequency of responses from respondents. Results of this study bear interesting implications towards the teaching and learning of ESL academic reading.

This study explores the potential of first language (L1) knowledge of Japanese kanji characters to be a predictor of English as a foreign language (EFL) competency among Japanese university students studying EFL. More specifically, it posits that learners who are more proficient at EFL have a proportionately higher level of kanji knowledge than students who are not as competent at EFL. For this study, 49 Japanese university students were divided into two levels (high or low), based on their TOEIC scores, and were tested on their kanji knowledge. Data analysis was performed to determine the Pearson's correlation coefficients (Pearson's r). Results show very weak correlations among females, but moderate correlations among males, suggesting that proficiency at reading L1 kanji characters among males in their youth could possibly be seen as a predictor of EFL learning success or a portent of better performance on EFL competency tests.

Abstract
Cognitive load theory has been utilized by second language acquisition (SLA) researchers to account for differences in learner performance with regards to different learning tasks. Certain instructional designs were shown to have an impact on cognitive load and working memory, and this impact was found to be accentuated in a multimedia environment where there is a variety of interacting elements and tools that can lead to cognitive overload and consequently reduced learning outcomes. This study investigated the influence of split-attention and integrated instructional formats on students cognitive load and how they might facilitate second language online reading and vocabulary learning. Twenty English as a Second Language (ESL) intermediate students studying at an Australian language institution were randomly assigned to four conditions: SAND (Split-Attention No Dictionary), SAOD (Split-Attention with Online Dictionary), IFND (Integrated Format No Dictionary), and IFOD (Integrated Format with Online Dictionary). Subjects were asked to complete an online reading comprehension task in which subjects tested under the SAND and SAOD conditions were exposed to a typical reading text followed by comprehension questions, whereas subjects in the IFND and IFOD conditions were exposed to a reading text where the comprehension questions were physically inserted within the reading text. Under the SAOD and IFOD conditions, subjects had access to an online dictionary. Results showed that the integrated reading format was found to facilitate students reading comprehension more than the split-attention format. Also, students who had access to the online dictionary in the SAOD and IFOD groups performed better on the vocabulary test, but spent more time on the reading task than the other two groups. Furthermore, participants in the split-attention format group looked up more words than their counterparts in the integrated format group. The results of the present study have certain implications for multimedia instructional designers and ESL teachers. © 2010 European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning.