| Summary: | 碩士 === 銘傳大學 === 應用英語學系碩士班 === 97 === Vocabulary knowledge and background knowledge have effects on reading comprehension. However, if a L2 reader’s vocabulary size or the capacity of background knowledge is inadequate, what strategies they use to assist them to solve reading obstacles. The study aims to investigate how vocabulary knowledge and background knowledge affect reading and how readers guess unknown words from context. In the experiment, two multiple-choice cloze tests, two recall protocols and two protocols of retrospective techniques which include the four information strategies – (1) syntactic information strategy, (2) semantic information strategy, (3) pragmatic information strategy and (4) factual information proposed by Honeyfield (1987) were adopted to explore L2 readers’ word-solving strategies.
Forty-four juniors from Applied English Department at a northern Taiwan university participated in the study. At the start of the whole experiment, they were administered Nation’s 3,000-word level test as the placement test. According to the scores of the placement test, they were categorized as the high-proficiency group and the low-proficiency group. Two multiple-choice cloze tests are composed of around 130 words respectively released by the College Entrance Examination Center (CEEC). Each passage of the cloze test has approximately 130 words with 10 deleted items. Thus, there are 10 questions in the test. Each question contains 4 choices (3 distractors and 1 correct answer). After finishing the cloze test, participants were asked to write down a recall protocol. Finally, they were asked to report of the four information strategies, which one they employed for each item. Data collected from the study were analyzed through descriptive statistics and the independent sample t-test.
Findings show that vocabulary knowledge and background knowledge affect the performance of two groups on the two tests. Global clues distinguish the high-proficiency from the low-proficiency group. The low-proficiency group still tended to rely on more bottom-up strategies while processing texts.
Keywords: reading strategies, vocabulary knowledge, background knowledge, cloze test
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