Call for participation: ENglish Reading Online (ENRO)

Victor Kuperman (Department of Linguistics and Languages, McMaster University, Canada) and Noam Siegelman (Haskins Laboratories, USA) invite interested colleagues to participate in a large-scale international project, titled ENRO (ENglish Reading Online).

“The idea is to conduct online tests of English reading comprehension and its component skills in university student pools across multiple English and non-English speaking-countries. A detailed questionnaire will also collect demographic and detailed language background information about participants. The end-result will be a publicly available and continuously updated resource with data on English reading behavior and component skills (spelling, vocabulary, listening comprehension, decoding, and others), and a detailed record of individual language proficiency and background. Because all stimuli will be identical across testing sites, the data will enable cross-sample comparisons and detailed studies of individual differences in reading ability. The data will contribute to the evaluation of how different L1s affect learning of the same L2. It will also shed light on what component skills of reading in English contribute the most to L2 English reading proficiency in speakers of different L1s.”

The online experiment ENRO is fully implemented: you can see a test version at https://reading.mcmaster.ca/exp/ENRO?source=readlabtest. The entire study takes 60-80 minutes.

  • We have received an ethics clearance from McMaster University, where online data are being collected and stored. The timeline of the project is defined as the end of the academic year in most countries (June-July 2020), though extensions for data collection are possible.
  • Close to 20 partner labs have agreed to join the project so far, with a diverse selection of L1s including, among others, Mongolian, Serbian, Turkish, Korean, Greek, Thai, and others. Multiple samples of the same language (from the same or different countries) are encouraged!

How to participate?
Identify whether you have access to a sample of participants. An optimal sample size for each test site is between 100-200 participants speaking the official language(s) of the country of testing. Non-native speakers of the official language are welcome too, but in addition to the core sample. This project would probably be the easiest to implement in departments/labs that have established pools of student participants who gain credits for participation.

Contact us (info below) for the full protocol of the study and further clarification.

What’s in it for you?
We expect to report the project data in one or two papers, to be submitted to Behavior Research Methods and other data-oriented journals. Team members from all sites will become co-authors on these papers. Students are welcome as co-authors. It is also okay to base student thesis work on (partial or full) ENRO data even before it is published. Data will be made available to co-authors as soon as it is fully cleaned and processed. Upon publication, data will be made openly available to the research community.

If you would like to know more about ENRO, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask for the full protocol of the study.

Contact Information
Victor Kuperman (Department of Linguistics and Languages, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada) vickup @ mcmaster.ca

Noam Siegelman (Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT, USA) noam.siegelman @ gmail.com

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