The Effects of Syntactic Enhancement on EFL Reading Fluency for Secondary School Students
- PDF / 640,582 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 61 Downloads / 220 Views
REGULAR ARTICLE
The Effects of Syntactic Enhancement on EFL Reading Fluency for Secondary School Students Youngmin Park1
•
Rosa Oh2
Ó De La Salle University 2018
Abstract Improving reading fluency in English is a challenging task for English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students. It is particularly hard for those whose first languages are linguistically distant from English, for example, Korea, Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian languages. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether digitally reformatted text scaffolds the development of English reading fluency in an EFL context. Visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) technology was used to reformat block-formatted English text into one with sentence structures highlighted. A total of 63 eighth graders (middle school students in Korea) read reformatted texts, while the control (n = 32) read their block-formatted textbook for 15 weeks. The analysis results of pre- and posttests indicated that reformatted texts could scaffold EFL students who learned to improve English reading fluency. However, reformatted texts did not positively affect reading speed, presumably because of different levels of vocabulary used in pre and posttests. We also found evidence that VSTF reformation can be used as syntactic enhancement which makes it easier for EFL students to take in English syntactic information as input. All in all, our findings suggest an effective instructional practice for EFL teachers with a focus on reading fluency. Keywords Digital scaffolding Reading fluency EFL Syntactic enhancement VSTF technology
& Youngmin Park [email protected] 1
Pusan National University, 104-708, Hyundai Apartment, 20, Suyeong-ro 741 beon-gil, Suyeong-gu, Busan 48222, Republic of Korea
2
Yonsei University, 1599-1885 50 Yonsei-ro Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, South Korea
Introduction Becoming fluent in second language (L2) is challenging. Especially for students of a noncognate language (i.e., languages that are not related through a common ancestor, such as English and Korean), it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to learn orthography, vocabulary, syntax, and other language systems. This challenge can be explained in terms of linguistic distance. The more dissimilar one’s native language (L1) is from L2, the more it costs to develop high proficiency (e.g., Chiswick et al. 2005). Exposure to oral language can help develop knowledge of vocabulary and syntax in written communication, which is necessary for fluent reading (Hoover and Gough 1990). However, oral communication is limited in foreign language learning contexts where L2 is not spoken in daily lives. These inhibiting factors are keeping many Korean students from becoming fluent in English, which may be also true for English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students in Asia Pacific areas. Among these factors, this study focused on syntactic knowledge, because it is especially hard to become proficient in applying L2 syntactic knowledge, as compared to other linguistic knowledge (Bernhardt 2000). This study
Data Loading...
