Measuring and Explaining the Reading Threshold Needed for English for Academic Purposes Texts

Abstract

Thisstudy attempts to answer two questions concerning the reading threshold needed for

What do they understand and how? Second time round

“…Students of the Group 2 type need to improve their L2 language proficiency and learn how to transfer their normally good L1 reading practices to the L2 context. They lend substance to Clarke's (1979) and Laufer and Sim's (1985) notion of an L2 competency threshold. Group 3 type students need both L1 reading and L2 language help: which to emphasize depends on the specific objective to be achieved.…”

“…But the central question in second or foreign language reading research is often posed in terms of whether L2 reading comprehension is basically a language problem or a reading problem, or both... Few authors address this question from a multi-variable standpoint and in the same individual (Clarke 1979;Laufer & Sim 1985;Block 1986;Cohen 1986;Carrell 1989Carrell , 1991. The most methodologically sound of these studies suggest, in support of Alderson (1984), a combined effect of both first language (L1) reading proficiency and L2 acquisition, with the latter weighing in more heavily at lower levels of language competence.…”

The Use of Islamic-Based Reading Materials to Increase Reading Comprehension Achievement: A Study at Islamic Higher Education Institution.

“…For the same range of scores, 28.2% of the students in the control group got 70 and above and the rest 71.8% got the scores below 70. If 60 is the passing grade, there will be 15.4% of the students (12) in the control group who fail the course and all students in the experimental group pass the course.…”

“…However, knowing the words only is not enough. Laufer & Sim, (1985) mention other important elements contributing to comprehensions such as the knowledge of the subject matter, discourse marker, and syntactic structure. These elements will highly influence the ability of a reader to comprehend a text.…”

The effect of contextualizing strategy on vocabulary learning in teaching Turkish language to foreigners<p>Yabancılara Türkçe öğretiminde bağlamlaştırma stratejisinin sözcük öğrenimine etkisi

“…Alsaawi, 2013). Bu engelleyiciler arasında sözcüğün anlamının bağlamdan çıkarılmasında en büyük sıkıntıyı yaratan unsurun bilinmeyen sözcüklerin sayısının olduğu vurgulanır (Laufer and Sim, 1985;Liu and Nation, 1985). …”