What Facilitates Reading Comprehension in EFL?

概要

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The purpose of this research was to see to what extent contextualized factors such as background knowledge affect the learners of a foreign language, i.e., to what extent a familiar and a foreign context affect the learners. The measure utilized for this purpose was a cloze procedure, which is reported to be a valid measure of reading proflciency. First, two American contextualized cloze tests, A Standard and B Standard, were prepared. Then, they were converted into the Japanese versions, i.e., A Modified and B Modified mainly by changing the proper nouns. In this way two pairs of syntactically identical but contextually different cloze tests were provided. The tested subjects were 159 Japanese junior college students. Half of them took a set of tests consisting of A Standard and B Mlodified and the rest took a set of tests consisting of B Standard and A Modified. The learners did significantly better in filling in the blanks of A and B Modified. This could mean familiar contexts facilitated the learners in reading comprehension. A few implications will be given based on this research result.
社団法人大学英語教育学会の論文
1987-10-08