The Effects of Suprasegmental Phonological Training on English Reading Comprehension: Evidence from Chinese EFL Learners
- PDF / 783,753 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 42 Downloads / 216 Views
The Effects of Suprasegmental Phonological Training on English Reading Comprehension: Evidence from Chinese EFL Learners Gang Cui1 · Yuemin Wang2 · Xiaoyun Zhong1 Accepted: 31 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This study aims to investigate the effect of suprasegmental phonological training on connected-text reading comprehension of Chinese university students with different English reading proficiency levels. A sample of 160 freshmen was recruited and randomly divided into experimental and control groups, and the experimental group was given a 12-week training on stress, intonation and rhythm in English. Comparison and analysis of the subjects’ reading comprehension performance, involving overall accuracy and speed as well as literal and inferential comprehension, reveal that: (1) suprasegmental phonological training exerts positive effects on the subjects’ overall reading comprehension, especially on reading time and literal comprehension; (2) lower-proficiency readers improve more remarkably than higher-proficiency readers in terms of overall accuracy and literal comprehension, while the effect of the training on reading time is significant regardless of the subjects’ reading proficiency. The results indicate that with explicit instruction and intensive exposure to suprasegmental knowledge, students’ automaticity in lower level processing, such as parsing and understanding propositional messages, can be increased. From a perspective of interaction among different cognitive and psychological processes of reading comprehension, this study can shed light on developing students’ reading comprehension in EFL contexts. Keywords Phonological processing · Suprasegmental · Phonological training · EFL reading comprehension
* Yuemin Wang [email protected] 1
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
2
Department of Foreign Languages, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yuquan Road 19#, Beijing 100049, China
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
Introduction Reading comprehension is one of the most complex and pervasive human activities that draws on many different cognitive skills and processes (Cain et al. 2004). Reading ability is essentially the extent to which an individual can use higher and lower level language skills and information-processing mechanisms to read and comprehend written language (Bell and Perfetti 1994). Psychological and linguistic research has greatly enhanced our understanding of the numerous factors, cognitive processes, mental structures, and textual properties that contribute to successful reading (Rapp and van den Broek 2005). The process of reading, though seemingly dealing with visual information, involves transformation and processing of phonological information (Perfetti 1999; Baddeley 2002). Many studies focus on the role that phonological awareness and suprasegmental phonology (or, prosody) play in children’s L1 reading development (Whalley and Hans
Data Loading...
