The Reading Lab led by ARiEAL Researcher, Dr. Victor Kuperman, will be hosting a talk by Yueming Xi, a PhD student from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, next Tuesday. Yueming Xi received her B.A. in Japanese from Dalian University of Foreign Languages in China and MEd. in Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College. At age 22, she was appointed as a faculty member of Japanese language and literature at Simmons College and Northeastern University in Boston, United States. As the only fully-funded international PhD student of 2014-2015 cohort of APHD (Applied Psychology and Human Development) program at OISE, she is currently researching literacy development among academically at-risk school-aged students, with a particular focus on linguistic minority population.
Title: Improving Reading Fluency through Reading Acceleration Program among Chinese-speaking EFLs
Presenter: Yueming Xi
Date: Tuesday, April 2, 2019
Time: 10:00 am to 11:30 am
Location: LRW 4018 (through ARiEAL entrance at LRW 4020), McMaster University
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The computerized Reading Acceleration Program (RAP) was designed to promote reading fluency by requiring participants to read while letters disappear from the screen, one at a time, in a fast-paced manner. It was shown to enhance reading fluency in research involving typically developing students and students with dyslexia from diverse linguistic backgrounds. Currently no research has examined the potential of RAP to accelerate reading fluency of second language learners, and specifically those from a non-alphabetic language such as Chinese. In this presentation, Xi will first review empirical evidence of the effectiveness of RAP from previous studies. She will then present the preliminary findings based on her dissertation project, the first attempt to examine the effect of RAP with Chinese-speaking English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Theoretical and educational implications will be discussed.