It should be noted, however, that because the Japanese response group did not do as well on the first writing sample and read slower than the other groups, a floor effect might have contributed to their superior gains. (One means of controlling for this difference is the use of analysis of covariance. Use of ANCOVA with intact non-randomized groups is not considered appropriate, however; see Pedhazer, 1982.) It should also be noted that the Japanese response group caught up with the English response group and passed the comparison group on reading speed, which strongly suggests that their superior gains were real.

Summary

The clearest result of the series of studies presented here is that extensive reading was a consistent winner in all three studies. In the first study, "reluctant" EFL students did extensive reading for one semester and made superior gains compared to a traditional class, nearly catching up to them by the end of the semester. In the second study, which lasted for one year, extensive readers in four-year and two-year colleges outperformed traditional student. In the third study, extensive readers who wrote summaries of the books they read in English outperformed traditional students who focused on practicing cloze exercises on a test of reading comprehension and had better gains on a cloze test. A group that wrote their summaries in Japanese also outperformed comparisons, but the difference was only significant for the reading comprehension test. This group, however, made the best gains in writing and reading speed, exceeding both the comparison group and the group that wrote summaries in English

The combined impact of the three studies can be presented in two ways. First, we can simply tally the number of cases in which the differences between the groups were statistically significant. Taking all cloze and reading comprehension comparisons into consideration, extensive readers made better gains in six out of seven cases and were worse in none. A more conservative version of this procedure is to only allow each group to count once. According to this procedure, extensive readers made better gains in four out of five comparisons (cloze test results only) and were worse in none.

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