This paper reports an approximate replication of Matsuda and Gobel (2004) for the psychometric validation of the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS). Their study examined the structural aspects of the FLRAS developed by Saito, Horwitz, and Garza (1999). The results showed that the FLRAS measured three different subcomponents of foreign language reading anxiety; none of the factors predicted foreign language performance in content-based and four-skill classes. The present study aimed to reconfirm the psychometric validity of the FLRAS because it has been widely employed to make foreign language reading anxiety researchable. Our study retained the same methodology, with the exception of the measurements of classroom performance and reading proficiency. Matsuda and Gobel's conclusions were reproduced by showing a weak relationship between classroom performance and foreign language reading anxiety measured by the three-factor model of the FLRAS. However, this study newly demonstrated a strong association of reading-anxiety subcomponents with learners' reading proficiency. The administration, scoring, and interpretation methods of the FLRAS were reconsidered based on the replicated results.

This study examined what linguistic variables affecting the cognitive process in reading comprehension determine the difficulty of Eiken reading passages. Using Coh-Metrix, a corpus analysis of Eiken first-grade to third-grade passages was run to compute lexical (word frequency and lexical diversity), syntactic (syntactic similarity), and meaning construction indices (argument overlap and occurrence of causal connectives and verbs). A stepwise discriminant function analysis showed that surface-level linguistic variables (i.e., lexical and syntactic indices) were stronger predictors in the discrimination of Eiken test grades than the linguistic variables affecting higher-level language processing. To verify whether these results corresponded with Japanese EFL learners' reading performance, Japanese university students completed recall tasks after reading second-grade and third-grade passages. A stepwise multiple regression analysis found that word frequency, lexical diversity, and syntactic similarity indices explained their recall productions. Consistent with the corpus analysis, the meaning construction indices did not explain the recall performances. These findings suggest that the difficulty of Eiken reading passages have probably been designed to measure learners' lower-level language processing abilities, such as word recognition and syntactic parsing.

This study aimed to depict the assessment process of treatment effects of extensive reading in a second language (L2) toward the establishment of an evidencebased practice. Although standardized mean differences between treatment and control groups have been applied to interpret the magnitude of treatment effects in observational studies on L2 teaching, individual effect sizes vary according to differences in learners, measures, teaching approaches, and research quality. Prior research on extensive reading has suffered from methodological restrictions, especially due to a lack of appropriate comparison between treatment and control groups. For these reasons, a retrospective meta-analysis including only studies that ensured betweengroup equivalence was conducted in Study 1 to estimate the effect sizes of extensive reading expected in specific teaching environments. When the focused skill of the one-semester program was reading comprehension, its effect size was predicted as d = 0.55. However, the moderator analysis showed that this treatment effect was overestimated due to selection bias in the analyzed studies and adjusted the effect size from 0.55 to 0.37. In Study 2, propensity score analysis was applied to minimize selection bias attributed to observed confounding variables in the comparison between non-randomized treatment and control groups. Data were collected from 109 Japanese university students of English who received in-class extensive reading for one semester and 115 students who attended another English class as the control group. Various types of matching were attempted, and in consideration of balancing the five covariates that might affect treatment effect estimation, the best solutions were nearest neighborhood matching without replacement, nearest neighborhood matching with replacement, and full matching. The results showed that the average treatment effects of extensive reading on all the participants (d = 0.24-0.44) and on the treated individuals (d = 0.32-0.40) were both consistent with the benchmark established in Study 1. Pedagogical implications and methodological limitations are discussed for decision-making regarding the implementation of L2 teaching practices based on research evidence.

The summar:y writing task has been widely used in order to exarnine how well readers comprehend texts (Alderson, 2000). As a scoring criterion of summary protocols, previous studies have considered whether or not a reader can effectively use rnacrorules, which refiect the process of readers' constmction of their mental representation (e.g., Johns & Mayes, 1990; Kim, 2001). In fact, the use of macrorules is assumed to be closely related to the process of how readers construct their menta1 representation of a passage (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). However, surnmary task has a methodological problem in that readers' performance in the use of macrorules reflects not only the process of reading comprehension but also their writing ski11s (Cohen, 1993), Therefbre, we haye used another psycholinguistic measure fbr reading comprehension that suppressed the influence of writing skills: the Mleaning ldbntijication 7lechnique (MIT). The present study examined English as a fbreign language (EFL) learners' macrorule use with the MIT as well as in a summary writing task. Focusing on three types of macrorules (i.e., deletion, generalization, and construction rules), Experimental Study 1 showed that EFL students used all three types of macrorules when they did summary writing, In Experimental Study 2 using the MIZ the generalization and constmction rules were more dicacult for learners to use than the deletion rule. These two rules required learners to generate inferences fbr constmcting the implicit main ideas oftexts, whereas the deletion rule simply required learners to select explicit main ideas from texts, Comparison of the two series of experimental studies indicated that surnmary writing encouraged the participants to use the generalization and construction rules by requiring them to integrate pieces of-185-The Japan Language Testing Association NII-Electronic Library Service The JapanLanguageTesting Association infbrmation for making the summary Therefore, macrorule use measured by the summary protocol should be interpreted carefu11M taking the effects of the summary task itselfinto account in terrns ofpromoted strategic macrorule use, Furtherrnore, it was implied that the MIT could be superior to a surnmary writing task as a reading comprehension test, as far as macrorule use under natural reading conditions reflected pure comprehension of a text.