| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 93 === The study investigated the effects of expository texts with structure guidelines on Taiwanese EFL senior high school students’ reading comprehension. The subjects, consisting of 105 second-year students in two different classes in National Hsin-Ying Senior High School, were respectively divided into a Control Group and an Experimental Group according to their pretest scores. To cope with the research questions of the experiment, the subjects in each group, according to the pretest scores, were further divided into a high proficiency group and a low proficiency group.
The subjects in the Experimental Group received a text structure awareness training program, which was aimed to provide the subjects with expository text structure awareness as a reading strategy through the instruction of six different expository texts with structure guidelines. After the implementation of the TSA program, all the subjects in both groups were required to take a posttest reading comprehension test, which contained six reading comprehension texts. Each of the six reading comprehension texts was entailed by five reading comprehension multiple-choice questions aiming to assess five different aspects of reading comprehension: main idea, vocabulary, supporting idea, detail, and inference. Besides, after the test, the subjects in the Experimental Group were also asked to fill in the posttest questionnaire designed by the researcher.
The major findings of the present study are summarized as follows:
1. The senior high EFL students in this study benefited
significantly from text structure awareness as a global
reading strategy, particularly in the main idea and
inference question types.
2. Judging from the performances of the high-proficient
subjects in the experimental group, text structure
awareness aided a lot in answering the inference question
type.
3. As for the performances of the low-proficient subjects in
the experimental group, although text structure awareness
exerted no significant influence on the vocabulary,
supporting idea, and detail comprehension, nonetheless, it
could facilitate the comprehension of the main idea and the
inference question types. Theoretically and practically
speaking, within each proficiency group, the low-proficient
subjects benefited from text structure awareness more than
the high-proficient ones.
4. With regard to the subjects’ attitudes towards the TSA
training program, most of the subjects (a) agreed that they
liked to participate in the TSA training program and as a
result their interest in English learning was increased,
(b) held a positive attitude that the TSA training program
could improve their reading ability and functioned as a
useful method for them to make progress in reading ability,
and (c) were able to identify the signals and take
advantage of them to distinguish different types of
expository text structures.
5. Regarding the subjects’ general application of text
structure awareness in the comprehension test, most of them
(a) agreed that text structure awareness as a reading
strategy could improve reading ability and increase reading
speed, (b) took a negative response to the use of text
structure awareness in the guessing of new words as well as
the understanding of detail information, and (c) confirmed
the positive effect of text structure awareness on the
grasping of main idea.
Based on the main findings of the study, some pedagogical suggestions are provided for EFL teachers:
1. It is recommended that besides adopting the traditional
bottom-up teaching approach, English teachers in Taiwan had
better integrate expository text structure awareness as a
supplementary reading strategy into their content-based
curricula. Thus, students may not regard reading
activities as boring and tedious, and therefore the whole
reading process is not merely a word-by-word or sentence-by-
sentence translation, but an interesting psychological
guessing game between the reader and the writer.
2. Although the analysis data in the study reveal that text
structure awareness served as of little assistance in these
three focuses of reading comprehension, it is not deniable
that the average performances of the experimental group
were still slightly better than those of the control group.
Therefore, we cannot deny the possible potential of text
structure awareness in the facilitation of reading
comprehension at the microstructure level.
3. Obtaining text structure awareness in their reading
comprehension schemata, students can further use it as a
self-study guide to cope with different types of reading
materials. Text structure awareness as a global reading
strategy undoubtedly can contribute to efficiency and
effectiveness in extensive reading.
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