Journal of English Language Teaching

Do Good Readers Acquire Words More Efficiently than Poor Readers?: A Comment on Joseph and Nation (2018)

Jeff McQuillan

Center for Educational Development, Los Angeles, California (USA)

Keywords: Good and poor readers, experienced readers

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Abstract

Joseph and Nation (2018) found that children who were “better comprehenders” acquired more words incidentally during reading than less-experienced readers. There were two possible confounds in their design that may have biased their results: (a) there was no control for the relative difficulty of the texts that their subjects read, and (b) their subjects’ exposure to the novel words was done in a way that may have favored those with better decoding skills.

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