Seven English second language students enrolled in informal reading comprehension and discussion classes through the American Language Institute at the University of Toledo were compared to determine whether the students who read extensively would outperform the students that did not through pretest and posttest measures. Follow-up interviews were also conducted to investigate the affective influence of extensive reading on the participants, the test-taking
strategies they use while taking the Test of English Foreign Language (TOEFL), and their opinions of the reading comprehension portion of the TOEFL. The researcher found that three of the participants who were to have read extensively did not achieve any considerable gain to the scores of their posttest measures, while one participant not required to read extensively did make a considerable gain. Qualitative data from the interviews suggests that whether or not a participant possessed an intrinsic motivation for reading influenced the outcome of these measures.