Tracking reading development in an English language university-level bridging program: evidence from eye-movements during passage reading

Abstract

Increasing numbers of international students enter university education via English language bridging programs. Much research has overlooked the nature of second language reading development during a bridging program, focusing instead on the development of literacy skills of international students who already meet the language requirement for undergraduate admission. We report a longitudinal eye-movement study assessing English passage reading efficiency and comprehension in 405 Chinese-speaking bridging program students. Incoming IELTS reading scores were used as an index of baseline reading ability. Linear mixed-effects regression models fitted to global eye-movement measures and reading comprehension indicated that despite initial between-subjects differences, within-subject change at each ability level progressed at the same rate, following parallel growth trajectories. Therefore, there was significant overall reading progress during the bridging program, but no evidence that the gap between low and high ability readers either closed or widened over time.

Reading experience drives L2 reading speed development: a longitudinal study of EAL reading habits

“…A similar percentage change of 34% was found by Beglar and Hunt (2014; group 1) in a study of reading rate gains in L1 Japanese EAL university students after 28 weeks of reading practice. Furthermore, our observed increases in reading speed are also consistent with longitudinal eye movement studies from a similar cohort of Mandarin and Cantonese speaking EALs (Schmidtke and Moro, 2021;Schmidtke et al, 2023). We add to these findings, demonstrating reading speed gains after a fixed period of 26 weeks of classroom instruction and within a relatively homogeneous cohort of EALs: all students were L1 Cantonese or Mandarin speakers, were aged 17-24 years, and all began the program with similar overall English competency (Overall IELTS score of between 5.0 and 6.5).…”

“…Prior research has examined the effect of L2 reading speed as a function of either (i) inter-individual differences in L2 language exposure (e.g., estimated via an L2 language experience survey: Whitford and Titone, 2012), or (ii) intra-individual change in reading experience via language exposure (e.g., in a pre-and post-test design: Sakurai, 2015;McLean and Rouault, 2017;Schmidtke et al, 2023). The novel aspect of the present study is that we quantify the effect of both sources of variability as predictors of change in reading speed.…”

“…First, we examine intra-individual change in L2 reading speed during the 26 weeks of English language instruction. Based on prior research (e.g., Beglar and Hunt, 2014;Schmidtke and Moro, 2021;Schmidtke et al, 2023), we expect text processing speed to become faster within this duration. Second, we gauge the impact of inter-individual differences in exposure to printed materials on change in L2 text reading speed during the bridging program.…”