second language reading | Daniel Schmidtke

Reading Gains that Stick: Greater Reading growth during EAP program, Higher GPAs Later

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The big idea

A lot of research shows that students improve during English bridging programs — but much less is known about whether those improvements pay off once students are in their degree programs. We linked students’ pre-university reading growth to their GPAs up to four years later.

What we did

Followed 405 English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) students through a 28-week university EAP program.
Measured reading and reading-related skills at the start and end of the program (including silent reading rate).
Predicted later undergraduate GPA using a mix of modern and traditional statistics:
- Random Forests to discover which variables mattered most
- Regression to quantify the size of the effect

What we found

Among many predictors, reading-rate growth during the program emerged as one of the top predictors of future GPA (a rare case where a change score is doing real work).
The relationship was meaningful in practical terms: a ~26 WPM larger improvement in silent reading rate predicted about a 0.21 GPA increase.
In plain language: students who became more efficient readers before university tended to thrive more academically afterward.

Why it matters

Reading isn’t just “one skill among many” at university — it’s the gateway to lectures, slides, textbooks, assignments, and exams. Our results suggest that helping students speed up comprehension-focused reading before degree programs begin can have long-lasting academic benefits.

Reading experience drives L2 reading speed development

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The big idea

Practice matters—but not all practice is equal. We tracked students’ real-world reading habits during a bridging program to test whether reading more English texts gives learners an extra boost in reading speed development, beyond the effect of instruction alone.

What we did

Followed 142 Mandarin/Cantonese-speaking English learners in an 8-month university bridging program.
Collected week-by-week reading logs over 26 weeks of classroom instruction, where students recorded what they read, how long they read, and how many pages they covered.
Modeled change in reading speed over time, then tested whether total pages read predicted who improved the most.

What we found

Students became faster readers over time: minutes-per-page decreased steadily across the program (a clear linear improvement).
The key finding: reading experience mattered. Students who read more pages during the program tended to show larger net gains in reading speed.

Why it matters

This gives a simple, practical lever for programs: instruction helps, but encouraging (and supporting) students to read more in English—especially beyond required coursework—can meaningfully accelerate reading fluency growth.

Do bridging programs close the reading gap? Eye-tracking evidence from passage reading

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The big idea

Bridging programs aim to help students become ready for university-level reading. But an open question is how reading growth unfolds across students who start at different levels. We tested three plausible patterns: the gap could widen (divergent), shrink (convergent), or stay the same (stable change).

What we did

Collected longitudinal passage-reading data from 405 bridging-program students (Mandarin/Cantonese L1) at two timepoints: program start (t1) and end (t2), across a 28-week program.
Used eye-tracking while students read full passages for comprehension, plus comprehension questions after each passage.
Used incoming IELTS Reading scores as an independent measure of baseline reading ability (so we’re not just grouping people by the outcome itself).

What we found

Students showed overall improvement by the end of the program in reading comprehension and multiple eye-movement indicators of reading efficiency.
The key result: we found stable change. Students who started stronger stayed stronger, and students who started weaker improved too—but at roughly the same rate (parallel growth trajectories), so the gap didn’t close or widen over the program.

Why it matters

This tells us two things at once: (1) bridging programs can produce meaningful reading gains, and (2) equal slopes don’t automatically mean equal outcomes—students who start behind may need extra, targeted support early if the goal is to narrow the gap by the end of the bridging program.