For homework, students engaged in self-selected reading. They were asked to read 60 to 100 pages from graded readers each week, about two to four books, and were asked to keep a record of books read, including the title, publisher, level of the graded readers, pages read and the time they spent reading. They were also asked to write a very short summary and reflection on each book they read. Students had access to a wide variety of graded readers from the university library.

Examination of the reading logs kept by students revealed that English majors were at a significantly higher level when the semester began. They reported reading books at the 600 and 1100 word levels, while the Health Science majors read books at the 200 to 600 word level. This difference was confirmed by their pretest scores on the cloze and writing tests (see results section).

In addition, English Majors had six additional hours of instruction per week in English, using Self-Access Pair Learning, a method in which students work in pairs using a textbook and audiotape. This approach consists of listening, speaking, pronunciation, writing and reading, with teacher intervention taking place only when there is a problem (Ross, 1992, p. 171). Even though Self-Access Pair Learning is not a teacher-fronted method, it has been shown to heavily emphasize form (Ross, 1992).

Measures

A 100-item cloze test was used as a pre and post-test. The passage was written at the 6th grade reading level and had approximately 1600 words with every 10th word deleted. Subjects received full credit if answers were grammatically and semantically correct, and full credit was given where there were mild spelling errors that did not influence the interpretation of the answer. The test-retest reliability of this measure is .87 (Mason, 2004).

Subjects also took a writing test at the beginning and end of the semester. The format for both was similar: Students were asked to read a story from an elementary level graded reader (1100 word level, less than 2000 words in length) and write a summary. Different stories were used for the pre- and post-test. The investigator totaled the number of words and phrases written for each essay, as well as the number of error-free phrases. (The usual procedure is to count error-free clauses; error-free phrases were analyzed here, the shorter unit chosen because of the high number of errors subjects made.)

The following example illustrates the procedure used:

Sample text: I woke up early on the morning. My father say, woke up Anna. When the train come, there is no one on the train.

Number of phrases = 7
1. I woke up
2. early on the morning
3. My father say
4. woke up Anna
5. when the train come
6. There is no one
7. on the train

2