The purpose of this study is to make an investigation of reading trends for the past one hundred years to ascertain and evaluate the extent and changes that have occurred.

This project resulted in the creation of a prototype for a new book series entitled Instructional Readers that will be linguistically engineered to assist English-language learners in acquiring academic and content-based vocabulary in the sciences. The development of the prototype represented a process of trial and error, with decisions firmly grounded in extensive research concerning linguistic features that assist vocabulary growth while reading. The end result, the prototype entitled Cellular Transport, reflects the author's best attempt to combine these features. The project write-up details the steps used in writing the prototype to aid in the creation of similar instructional readers in the future.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the overall effectiveness of extensive reading, and whether learners' ages impact learning from extensive reading differently. The second purpose is to investigate whether the length of time that second language learners engaged in extensive reading influenced outcome measures, and if an effect is found, identify effective periods of time for learners to engage in extensive reading. Meta-analysis was used to investigate the trends shown by past empirical research, chart future research directions, and provide a means to create alternative hypotheses for future research. Two types of empirical studies were conducted: group contrasts of studies that included control groups and pre-post contrasts of studies that only include experimental groups. This meta-analysis included 34 studies that provided 43 unique effect sizes (22 effect sizes for group contrasts and 21 effect sizes for pre-post contrasts) and a total sample size of 3,942 participants. Students who received extensive reading instruction outperformed those who did not. The effect size was small for group contrasts (d = .46) and medium for pre-post contrasts (d = .71). Moderator variables for each contrast were examined to assess the impact of learners' ages and the length of instruction; however, all groups substantially overlapped with each other in terms of their confidence intervals, indicating no statistically significant difference among the groups. There was a small effect size for university students for the group contrast (d = .48), a medium effect for high school students (d = .61), a large effect for university students (d = 1.12), and a large effect for adults (d = 1.48) for pre-post contrasts. In terms of the length of instruction, both one semester of instruction (d = .36) and one year of instruction (d = .52) produced a small effect for group contrasts, while one year of instruction produced a medium effect (d = .74) for pre-post contrasts. In sum, the available extensive reading research to date suggests that extensive reading improves students' reading proficiency and should therefore be a part of foreign language reading curricula.   / CITE/Language Arts

The diploma thesis deals with the relationship between graded readers and teaching vocabulary. We examine whether extensive reading leads to vocabulary acquisition on the basis of context provided by graded readers. In addition, we focus on the frequency of occurrence of individual lexical items and we interpret it as an important variable in teaching lexis. These two factors are compared using test data from two groups of experiment participants. The first group (the reading group) was asked to read the text at their own pace, while the second group was asked to read the text while listening to it being narrated by an English native speaker. Based on hitherto research, the listening group is expected to outperform the reading group. After introducing the topic in chapter 1, we attempt to define extensive reading in chapter 2. Graded readers are based on providing sufficient amount of context for understanding unknown vocabulary. In this chapter we contrast practical application of extensive reading with theoretical foundation in secondary literature. Chapter 3 delineates the methodology used in the present thesis. It is based on replicating a study by Waring and Takaki (2003), and also on research into audio- assisted reading. This methodology is used to measure the efficiency of reading and...

The aim of this essay is to explore in what way Graded Readers are different from authentic texts against the background of English as a Second Language (ESL) and the use of authentic and simplified text in ESL teaching. The material used for this purpose is the authentic text of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and two upper-intermediate Graded Readers from two different publishers. The study uses the software readability-score and manual analysis to examine the texts with regards to lexical choice, language structure and story. The study showed that the Graded Readers are simplified in all aspects studied. Moreover, the Graded Readers differ from each other as well, most notably in the style of the text due to sentence structure and story simplification. This could imply that different authors of Graded Readers adopt different styles when simplifying text and that the grading levels are not comparable between different publishers. / <p>Engelska</p>

Reading English literature can help learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) to develop their reading ability as well as other language skills. Reading can also have other benefits for EFL students such as learning about the target language’s culture or learn about an English variety in written form. This present study investigates what types of literature are used in Swedish upper secondary school, the EFL teachers’ attitudes towards short stories compared to simplified novels/graded readers and their preferred assessment methods associated with literature teaching. The majority of the teachers that took part in this survey have a positive attitude towards short stories and use them in their EFL classes. The results also show that after the students have completed reading a short story, most of the teachers that participated in this survey preferred to combine examination methods such as a group discussion with a written test. The title of this paper comes from one of the informants’ comments when asked if she would rather use a short story or a graded reader in her English class. This informant had used graded readers in her English language classroom, but she and everyone that took part in this survey chose short stories over graded readers.

This study analyzes ten beginning-level, Spanish-language graded readers in an attempt to answer the question of how much vocabulary do students need to know before being able to successfully participate in an extensive reading program. The study also analyzes the vocabulary taught in a beginning-level Spanish textbook to determine how well this vocabulary reflects the most common words in Spanish according to a frequency dictionary. It was found that a lexicon of 5,000 words was needed to obtain a sufficient level of comprehension in order for extensive reading to occur and that the textbook examined in this study did not present vocabulary that was extremely reflective of the most common words in the Spanish language.

Reading English literature can help learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) to develop their reading ability as well as other language skills. Reading can also have other benefits for EFL students such as learning about the target language’s culture or an English variety in written form. This present study investigates what types of literature are used in Swedish upper secondary school, the EFL teachers’ attitudes towards short stories compared to simplified novels/graded readers and their preferred assessment methods associated with literature teaching. The majority of the teachers that took part in this survey have a positive attitude towards short stories and use them in their EFL classes. The results also show that after the students have completed reading a short story, most of the teachers that participated in this survey preferred to combine examination methods such as a group discussion with a written test.The title of this paper comes from one of the informants’ comments when asked if she would rather use a short story or a graded reader in her English class. This informant had used graded readers in her English language classroom, but she and everyone that took part in this survey chose short stories over graded readers.

This diploma thesis Extensive reading - Position and Practices of Using Graded Readers in Prague Grammar schools and Students' Attitudes to a Particular Programme presents the phenomenon of extensive reading. It looks into its history, theoretical grounding, the existing body of empirical research, graded readers and benefits for English language teaching and learning. The analytical part gives reasons for the contrast between the great potential of extensive reading for the student's improvement on the one hand, and the implementation which has been infrequent and often at odds with the principles on the other. To find the reasons, the theoretical part analysed the situation of the English language teaching in countries which had implemented extensive reading into the curriculum. In the research part it assesses the scale and the practices of using graded readers in all relevant grammar schools in Prague. In the second part of the survey of grammar schools, it focuses on a grammar school in Mělník, which has been systematically using GRs. It examines the students' attitudes towards the practices of reading GRs in order to assess the potential and the limits of the European Union financed project I read, you read, we read. Key words: Extensive reading, Methodology of English Teaching, Implicit...

Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo principal a proposta de novas notas de rodapé para o livro I Promessi Sposi Adattamento del testo e note di Marisa Pasqualetti, CIDEB, 2007. Inicialmente, fizemos um levantamento dos livros de leitura graduada para estrangeiros existentes no mercado editorial italiano. Verificamos que alguns dos títulos eram adaptações de obras clássicas da literatura italiana, outros eram policiais, de aventura e romance. A característica comum a esses títulos, além da linguagem controlada, é que todos eles apresentam notas de rodapé e que, na maioria das vezes, essas notas trazem um vocabulário já conhecido pelo público brasileiro. Dessa forma, colocamos as questões que pretendemos responder ao final dessa pesquisa: para quem é destinada as notas de rodapé dessas obras? A simplificação lexical é suficiente para tornar uma obra de fácil leitura? Qual é o critério usado para a escolha das palavras que vão compor as notas de rodapé dessas obras? Para a proposta das novas notas de rodapé do livro I Promessi Sposi adaptado, aplicamos a leitura da obra a sete grupos de alunos que possuíam, de certa forma, o mesmo nível de conhecimento lexical. Foi pedido a esses alunos que ao final da primeira leitura realizassem uma segunda leitura (de modo a provocar o mínimo possível de ruído na primeira leitura) preenchendo uma tabela que continha três colunas: primeira coluna elenco das palavras que constavam nas notas de rodapé desnecessariamente; segunda coluna palavras que não constavam nas notas de rodapé, porém, que deveriam constar (nesse caso, não seria todas as palavras desconhecidas, mas aquelas, que em uma leitura global ainda apresentavam-se incompreensíveis ou duvidosas); terceira coluna palavras que constavam no rodapé cuja explicação era insuficiente. Analisamos as colunas de 50 fichas preenchidas pelos alunos e verificamos que, das 213 palavras e/ou expressões que faziam parte das notas de rodapé, 77 eram desnecessárias, 19 deveriam ser reformuladas e 55 deveriam ser inseridas. Ao final, o título analisado teria 191 notas destinadas ao público brasileiro, 22 a menos do que o número total utilizado pela editora. / This research mainly aims at proposing new footnotes to the book I Promessi Sposi Adattamento del testo e note di Marisa Pasqualetti, CIDEB, 2007. At first, we made a survey of the graded readers for foreigners that we have access to in the Italian publishing industry. We identified that some of the books are adaptations from classic books in the Italian literature; others were suspense, adventure or romance stories. The common feature in all these classics, besides the graded language, is that all of them present footnotes, and that most of the times the vocabulary used is already familiar to the Brazilian readers. This way, we placed the following queries that we want to elicit in our research: Whom are the footnotes addressed to? Is the lexical simplification sufficient in order to make the reading of a piece of art of easy attainability? What is the criterion used for choosing the words which will come as footnotes in these books? In order to propose the new footnotes for the adapted I Promessi Sposi, we asked 07 different groups that were basically in the same lexical level to read the story. The students were asked to do a second reading right after the first one (in such a way so as to provoke the least interference in the first reading) and were asked to fill in a table with three columns: the first column demanded a list of words that were unnecessarily explained in the footnotes; the second column asked for words that were not in the footnotes but should be (in this case, not all the words would be unknown, but also words that could result in doubts or misunderstandings in a global reading); and the third column asked for words that were in the footnotes but whose explanations were insufficient. We analyzed the columns in 50 records filled up by the students and we found that from the 213 words and expressions that were in the footnotes, 77 were unnecessary, 19 should be reformulated and 55 should be inserted. By the end, the title which was chosen should have 191 footnotes destined to the Brazilian readers, 22 less that the number used by the publishing house.