Both extensive reading groups did about three to four hours per week of homework. The experimental classes devoted this time to extensive reading, while the comparison group did cloze exercises and intensive reading with a dictionary.

Measures. The same cloze test that was used in Experiments 1 and 2 was given as a pre- and post-test. In addition, a test of reading comprehension was used, but only post-test scores were available for statistical analysis for the reading comprehension test.

The reading comprehension test was demanding: it consisted of about 20 pages of text (about 250-300 words per page) from an intermediate level (1600 word level) guided reader, which subjects were given one hour to read. There were 50 multiple choice questions, which subjects answered in 30 min. Reliability was estimated to be r = 0.86 (Kudar-Richardson formula, applied to comparison group).

In addition, subjects in all three groups were asked to write a summary in English of a book they read at the beginning of the school year, and were asked to repeat this task using the same book at the end of the academic year. The two summaries were evaluated holistically by two native speakers of English on a 1-6 scale, where 1 = worst and 6 = best writing. Specifically, raters were first asked to categorize papers as "good", "bad", or "average". Then papers in each pile were re-evaluated and divided into two groups to form six categories. As in Experiment 2, judges did not know whether the papers had been written at the beginning or end of the academic year.

Subjects were also asked how much time it took them to read the required book at the beginning of the year, and to indicate how much time it took them to read the same book at the end of the year.

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