A. Introduction
This research was done by Lu Fang Lin, Ph. D, an assistant professor in the Foreign Language teaching and Research Center, National Taiwan Ocean University, Taiwan, who is involved in research into English teaching in the EFL context and English reading comprehension instruction. This research was published in online journal website at http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/March_08_home.php in March 2008.
This research investigated how English learners can retell two kinds of text with culturally familiar and unfamiliar topics, in this case they are Chinese and non-Chinese topics. Firstly, Lin, the researcher examined whether there was difference of English learners’ way of synthesizing between those types of passages/texts and it was showed that there was no significant difference. Then secondly, synthesizing information was classified by function and strategy to explain how the participants utilized the synthesizing process to comprehend an English passage on Chinese versus non-Chinese topics. Thirdly, Lin, the researcher, explained the process of how the participant utilized prior knowledge to produce synthesizing information. And in the last section of her paper, the researcher gave some recommendations for classroom practice in an effort to help language teachers apply the result of the study to the actual instructional context.
B. Body
In the introduction of this research, it is said that most of researcher in the field of reading comprehension have agreed that the readers’ prior knowledge can affect the degree of text comprehension. Furthermore, a great number of empirical studies have demonstrated significant impact of prior knowledge on reading comprehension. Because of its important role, prior knowledge is viewed as the key resource in the meaning construction of reading process. The followings are summary of each subtitle in this study.
Cognitive reading process
In cognitive science, reading can be viewed as a literacy process connected with cognition which refers to any internal or mental aspects of reading. This process included attending, analyzing, associating, predicting, inferring, synthesizing, generalizing, and monitoring and these processes might operate on various sizes of text units which are depended on the reader purpose. However, these all cognitive processes require knowledge. Then, prior knowledge will be added as a factor influencing the operation of these cognitive processes.
Macrostructure Formation during comprehension
Kintsch claimed that macrostructure formation occurred as an integral of comprehension. During the comprehension process, a reader can select a macroproposition and delete several micropositions. Thus, in forming a generalization, several microproposition can be replaced by an appropriate macroproposition which is called reduction process.
Effectiveness of Prior Knowledge in L2 (second language) Reading Comprehension
In previous studies, the effect of cultural specific prior knowledge and global knowledge still compete with each other. For example, research on the effect of content schemata held the perspective that L2 readers’ culturally specific schemata might cause reading difficulty. Therefore, comprehension of a culturally unfamiliar text was more difficult than comprehension of a culturally familiar text. On the other hand, readers’ comprehension of text could be attributed to cross-cultural prior knowledge, which was not culturally bound but a global knowledge of the world. Some parts of this type of knowledge in some studies could be termed as subject knowledge or content knowledge which might as well, to some degree, facilitate L2 students’ reading comprehension.
Restraints and Conflicts in Previous Research
Methodology Elaboration
In this study, the researcher elaborated on the methodology used in previous research by Cohen (1988) and in previous research on the issue of macrostruture. In the previous experiments for measuring macrostructure comprehension (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Guindon & Kintsch, 1984; Lorch, Lorch, & Mathews, 1985), they focused on the recognition task to study the speed and accuracy with which reading times for topic and detail sentences were calculated, and words from topic and detail sentences were recognized. In this study the researcher used the retelling technique to examine how L2 readers form macrostructures. As used to analyze readers’ retellings, synthesized information at intra- and inter sentential levels might “[come] from more than one part of the passage” (Alberta Education, 1986, p. 44) and included synthesis of single words, clauses, phrases, or sentences. For a higher level of synthesizing information, the reader might reconstruct the author’s words and ideas and produce synthesizing information across paragraphs. Also, to show the reader’s dynamic development of reading process, the present study increased the number of the topics to prolong the period of data collection.
To generate a concept of English learners’ general English reading, the present study added more topics that did not demand discipline-specific information.
Research Purpose and Research Questions
The purpose of the research:
1. To examine the effects of prior knowledge on L2 readers’ synthesizing process of the text with cultural specific topics (Chinese topics and non Chinese topics).
2. To explore how English learners apply their prior knowledge to comprehend English passages with Chinese and non-Chinese topics.
Three research questions were formulated to guide this study:
1. Is there a difference between English learners’ synthesizing information while retelling passages with Chinese versus non-Chinese topics?
2. How do English learners utilize the synthesizing process to comprehend an English passage on Chinese versus non-Chinese topics?
3. How do English learners use prior knowledge to produce synthesizing information?
Methodology
Participants
The participants in this study were from a senior high school in Taipei, Taiwan. In this study, the researcher considered the students’ cultural background and made an adapted Informal Reading Inventory (IRI). After each student was given an English reading test through the IRI, 14 Grade 11 senior high school students were selected to join the study. According to the results of the IRI, their English reading proficiency level was at the grade seven instructional level. The rationale for using this level of students as participants was that according to teachers’ comments on this group of participants’ general English ability, their English academic achievements were at the top ten from the highest scores in their class and they would be better able to express their own opinions.
The Procedure of the Study
The study began with a retelling practice session to ensure that all participants have the necessary abilities to retell the passage in Mandarin, if their retelling performances were satisfied, each of them joined individual retelling meeting. After that, the researcher had an immediate interview with each participant to confirm some vague description in his/her retellings.
Retelling Assessment Technique
The retelling technique encourages participants to retell the story in their own words. With such perspective, participants may be encouraged to restate the essential part of the original text, relate what they knew about the content of the text and to reconstruct the information they have just read without looking at the passage again.
Materials
In this study, twelve passages were used as reading materials for the retellings.
Six passages have topics on Chinese culture:
Scoring and Labeling the Participants’ Retelling Protocols
After the participant finished retelling, the researcher transcribed the recorded retelling in Mandarin and further translated it into English. Then the researcher adopted the DRP procedure for judging the students’ retellings and divided the participants’ retellings into smaller meaningful independent units called thought units. A thought unit is a group of words representing a syntactically grammatical and meaningful unit of information represented in a text or retold by the participants. For example, one simple sentence is regarded as one unit for it conveys a piece of meaningful information independently.
After the participant’s retelling was divided into thought units, the parsed retelling information was further screened and labeled into synthesizing information (S). The thought units of this category were then summed up. To ensure the credibility of the analysis, the researcher asked another PH. D. student who was a native English speaker as a second rater.
Results and Discussion
Synthesizing Information
The statistic analysis in Means and Standard Deviations for Synthesizing Information Chinese and Non-Chinese provided the answer to the first research question that there is no significant difference in the participants’ synthesizing information when retelling the passages with (on) Chinese and those with non-Chinese topics. The possible reason can be that the participants may have had the competence of an awareness of the macrosturures and then combine some information in the text to make a synthesized statement over the passage on culturally familiar and unfamiliar topic.
A process of integration
In this study, most participants generalized ideas from several sentences and produced a larger gist or general meaning. That is, one synthesizing statement extracted the words directly from two or three sentences and interweaved another new statement.
A process of reconstruction
In this study, the participant reconstructed the meaning of the text by using their own words rather than the author’s words. Such kind of synthesizing information usually conveys the essential meaning presented in sentences.
A process of deletion
In this study, the participant retold a generalized statement by reducing some minor details, especially those with unfamiliar vocabulary. In the interview, the participants expressed that they did not use much of their life experience to understand this unfamiliar word because they did not have that in Taiwan. They stated that they had no idea about the words, so they skipped retelling the segment with unknown vocabulary in it, and thus made a generalized statement for the paragraph with their general knowledge of date sequence.
A pragmatic strategy of opening a talk and filling up the gap
In the beginning section of most retelling meetings, there was a period of silence. Most participants usually prefaced their retelling with a short over-generalization for the whole passage. Most participants directly used the topic to produced such synthesizes. These broad over-generalizations were still categorized as synthesizing information in this study although they were a much different synthesis that did not exactly summarize main ideas from the original text. Such over-generalizations could be a strategy they used to opening their talk.
Utilization of cross-cultural prior knowledge
In this study, the participant expressed that they did not have much of prior knowledge about non-Chinese topics, so they mostly could not retell many detailed contents of the passage but they could retell synthesizing information.
General findings can be summed up to show that the production of synthesizing information may primarily depend on the participant’s prior knowledge. If the participant lacks culturally specific knowledge about the text, they may rely on their cross-cultural prior knowledge and thus synthesize information in generalized way. In this study, the passages with non-Chinese topics may include several messages related to culturally specific prior knowledge and cross-cultural prior knowledge. When retelling the passages with non-Chinese topics, synthesizing information may occur as often as in passages with Chinese topics. Therefore, there is no difference found in synthesizing information between the two types of passages. This study also finds that if the participant has neither culturally specific knowledge nor cross-cultural prior knowledge, most of the message in the text cannot be synthesized.
Author’s Recommendations
C. Conclusion
In this study, this group of teenagers has proved that they have the ability to retell synthesizing information over familiar and unfamiliar topic passages with the assistance of their prior knowledge.Moreover, the results of the study provide further evidence in the field of prior knowledge studies to ensure the essential impact of the cross-cultural knowledge (Brantmeier, 2005; Hammadou, 2000). More than that, the findings of the study suggest that the reader’s cross-cultural knowledge can facilitate English learners to operate a synthesizing process. In contrast, the result of the study was not in agreement with Cohen et al’s (1988) conclusion that non-natives had more trouble synthesizing the information at the intra- and inter sentential levels as well as across paragraphs than natives. The different result from this study and the classification of synthesizing information can add new knowledge to the field of English learners’ cognitive reading process. In the near future, the researcher will include other groups of English learners with different levels of English reading abilities to further examine the non-natives’ synthesizing process via culturally specific and cross-cultural topic passages.
D. Comment
After reading and trying to understand this journal, I can say that this is a good journal. It stands for some reasons. First, this journal is written systematically and has complete composition / content, also the author biography and references are provided. It means that this journal can be used for academic usage. Second, the method in retelling assessment in this study is slightly different from that of recall. The third reason, then, it provides data of the study and it seems quite valid because in collecting data the researcher asked another PhD student who was a native English speaker as a second rater to ensure the credibility of the analysis. Then, the last reason, but not the least, I said that this is a good journal because this journal provide a study which can give a new finding/result that fix the misunderstanding/restraint in the previous research.
Finally, I suggest to other student to read this journal because this journal provides new knowledge which might be useful for us. After all, this journal uses communicative language and easy to be understood as well.
This research was done by Lu Fang Lin, Ph. D, an assistant professor in the Foreign Language teaching and Research Center, National Taiwan Ocean University, Taiwan, who is involved in research into English teaching in the EFL context and English reading comprehension instruction. This research was published in online journal website at http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/March_08_home.php in March 2008.
This research investigated how English learners can retell two kinds of text with culturally familiar and unfamiliar topics, in this case they are Chinese and non-Chinese topics. Firstly, Lin, the researcher examined whether there was difference of English learners’ way of synthesizing between those types of passages/texts and it was showed that there was no significant difference. Then secondly, synthesizing information was classified by function and strategy to explain how the participants utilized the synthesizing process to comprehend an English passage on Chinese versus non-Chinese topics. Thirdly, Lin, the researcher, explained the process of how the participant utilized prior knowledge to produce synthesizing information. And in the last section of her paper, the researcher gave some recommendations for classroom practice in an effort to help language teachers apply the result of the study to the actual instructional context.
B. Body
In the introduction of this research, it is said that most of researcher in the field of reading comprehension have agreed that the readers’ prior knowledge can affect the degree of text comprehension. Furthermore, a great number of empirical studies have demonstrated significant impact of prior knowledge on reading comprehension. Because of its important role, prior knowledge is viewed as the key resource in the meaning construction of reading process. The followings are summary of each subtitle in this study.
Cognitive reading process
In cognitive science, reading can be viewed as a literacy process connected with cognition which refers to any internal or mental aspects of reading. This process included attending, analyzing, associating, predicting, inferring, synthesizing, generalizing, and monitoring and these processes might operate on various sizes of text units which are depended on the reader purpose. However, these all cognitive processes require knowledge. Then, prior knowledge will be added as a factor influencing the operation of these cognitive processes.
Macrostructure Formation during comprehension
Kintsch claimed that macrostructure formation occurred as an integral of comprehension. During the comprehension process, a reader can select a macroproposition and delete several micropositions. Thus, in forming a generalization, several microproposition can be replaced by an appropriate macroproposition which is called reduction process.
Effectiveness of Prior Knowledge in L2 (second language) Reading Comprehension
In previous studies, the effect of cultural specific prior knowledge and global knowledge still compete with each other. For example, research on the effect of content schemata held the perspective that L2 readers’ culturally specific schemata might cause reading difficulty. Therefore, comprehension of a culturally unfamiliar text was more difficult than comprehension of a culturally familiar text. On the other hand, readers’ comprehension of text could be attributed to cross-cultural prior knowledge, which was not culturally bound but a global knowledge of the world. Some parts of this type of knowledge in some studies could be termed as subject knowledge or content knowledge which might as well, to some degree, facilitate L2 students’ reading comprehension.
Restraints and Conflicts in Previous Research
- The cognitive process variable, the synthesizing process, has not been examined closely.
- the inconsistent results
- Conflicting opinions that that non-natives had more trouble synthesizing the information
Methodology Elaboration
In this study, the researcher elaborated on the methodology used in previous research by Cohen (1988) and in previous research on the issue of macrostruture. In the previous experiments for measuring macrostructure comprehension (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Guindon & Kintsch, 1984; Lorch, Lorch, & Mathews, 1985), they focused on the recognition task to study the speed and accuracy with which reading times for topic and detail sentences were calculated, and words from topic and detail sentences were recognized. In this study the researcher used the retelling technique to examine how L2 readers form macrostructures. As used to analyze readers’ retellings, synthesized information at intra- and inter sentential levels might “[come] from more than one part of the passage” (Alberta Education, 1986, p. 44) and included synthesis of single words, clauses, phrases, or sentences. For a higher level of synthesizing information, the reader might reconstruct the author’s words and ideas and produce synthesizing information across paragraphs. Also, to show the reader’s dynamic development of reading process, the present study increased the number of the topics to prolong the period of data collection.
To generate a concept of English learners’ general English reading, the present study added more topics that did not demand discipline-specific information.
Research Purpose and Research Questions
The purpose of the research:
1. To examine the effects of prior knowledge on L2 readers’ synthesizing process of the text with cultural specific topics (Chinese topics and non Chinese topics).
2. To explore how English learners apply their prior knowledge to comprehend English passages with Chinese and non-Chinese topics.
Three research questions were formulated to guide this study:
1. Is there a difference between English learners’ synthesizing information while retelling passages with Chinese versus non-Chinese topics?
2. How do English learners utilize the synthesizing process to comprehend an English passage on Chinese versus non-Chinese topics?
3. How do English learners use prior knowledge to produce synthesizing information?
Methodology
Participants
The participants in this study were from a senior high school in Taipei, Taiwan. In this study, the researcher considered the students’ cultural background and made an adapted Informal Reading Inventory (IRI). After each student was given an English reading test through the IRI, 14 Grade 11 senior high school students were selected to join the study. According to the results of the IRI, their English reading proficiency level was at the grade seven instructional level. The rationale for using this level of students as participants was that according to teachers’ comments on this group of participants’ general English ability, their English academic achievements were at the top ten from the highest scores in their class and they would be better able to express their own opinions.
The Procedure of the Study
The study began with a retelling practice session to ensure that all participants have the necessary abilities to retell the passage in Mandarin, if their retelling performances were satisfied, each of them joined individual retelling meeting. After that, the researcher had an immediate interview with each participant to confirm some vague description in his/her retellings.
Retelling Assessment Technique
The retelling technique encourages participants to retell the story in their own words. With such perspective, participants may be encouraged to restate the essential part of the original text, relate what they knew about the content of the text and to reconstruct the information they have just read without looking at the passage again.
Materials
In this study, twelve passages were used as reading materials for the retellings.
Six passages have topics on Chinese culture:
- Chinese Farming (CF1),
- Chinese New Year (CNY3),
- Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (SYS5),
- The Great Wall (GW7),
- The History of Tea (HT9), and
- Cooking and Eating (CE11).
- The other six passages have topics on non-Chinese culture including Canadian and European historical events, peoples, and customs. They are;
- River of Salmon (RS2),
- Railway across Canada (RC4),
- First Peoples in Canada (FPC6),
- Easter (EAS8),
- Fishing in Canada (FC10), and
- Ways of Sending a Message (WSM12)
Scoring and Labeling the Participants’ Retelling Protocols
After the participant finished retelling, the researcher transcribed the recorded retelling in Mandarin and further translated it into English. Then the researcher adopted the DRP procedure for judging the students’ retellings and divided the participants’ retellings into smaller meaningful independent units called thought units. A thought unit is a group of words representing a syntactically grammatical and meaningful unit of information represented in a text or retold by the participants. For example, one simple sentence is regarded as one unit for it conveys a piece of meaningful information independently.
After the participant’s retelling was divided into thought units, the parsed retelling information was further screened and labeled into synthesizing information (S). The thought units of this category were then summed up. To ensure the credibility of the analysis, the researcher asked another PH. D. student who was a native English speaker as a second rater.
Results and Discussion
Synthesizing Information
The statistic analysis in Means and Standard Deviations for Synthesizing Information Chinese and Non-Chinese provided the answer to the first research question that there is no significant difference in the participants’ synthesizing information when retelling the passages with (on) Chinese and those with non-Chinese topics. The possible reason can be that the participants may have had the competence of an awareness of the macrosturures and then combine some information in the text to make a synthesized statement over the passage on culturally familiar and unfamiliar topic.
A process of integration
In this study, most participants generalized ideas from several sentences and produced a larger gist or general meaning. That is, one synthesizing statement extracted the words directly from two or three sentences and interweaved another new statement.
A process of reconstruction
In this study, the participant reconstructed the meaning of the text by using their own words rather than the author’s words. Such kind of synthesizing information usually conveys the essential meaning presented in sentences.
A process of deletion
In this study, the participant retold a generalized statement by reducing some minor details, especially those with unfamiliar vocabulary. In the interview, the participants expressed that they did not use much of their life experience to understand this unfamiliar word because they did not have that in Taiwan. They stated that they had no idea about the words, so they skipped retelling the segment with unknown vocabulary in it, and thus made a generalized statement for the paragraph with their general knowledge of date sequence.
A pragmatic strategy of opening a talk and filling up the gap
In the beginning section of most retelling meetings, there was a period of silence. Most participants usually prefaced their retelling with a short over-generalization for the whole passage. Most participants directly used the topic to produced such synthesizes. These broad over-generalizations were still categorized as synthesizing information in this study although they were a much different synthesis that did not exactly summarize main ideas from the original text. Such over-generalizations could be a strategy they used to opening their talk.
Utilization of cross-cultural prior knowledge
In this study, the participant expressed that they did not have much of prior knowledge about non-Chinese topics, so they mostly could not retell many detailed contents of the passage but they could retell synthesizing information.
General findings can be summed up to show that the production of synthesizing information may primarily depend on the participant’s prior knowledge. If the participant lacks culturally specific knowledge about the text, they may rely on their cross-cultural prior knowledge and thus synthesize information in generalized way. In this study, the passages with non-Chinese topics may include several messages related to culturally specific prior knowledge and cross-cultural prior knowledge. When retelling the passages with non-Chinese topics, synthesizing information may occur as often as in passages with Chinese topics. Therefore, there is no difference found in synthesizing information between the two types of passages. This study also finds that if the participant has neither culturally specific knowledge nor cross-cultural prior knowledge, most of the message in the text cannot be synthesized.
Author’s Recommendations
- In this study, most participants could provide a synthesized topic statement in the beginning of their retellings. This result recommends that the instructor notify the students the text with a topic or a paragraph with a topic sentence.
- This finding can also suggest that the instructor may lead the students to read a passage without a topic first and ask them to assign a topic for the passage they have just read.
- The study finds that the synthesizing information integrates main ideas from several sentences. The teaching activity can be that after learners finish reading a passage, the instructor asks them to figure out the essential parts in the passage and use the following patterns to lead them to describe the generalized concepts of the segments of a text
- The result of this study shows that the participants still can do well in synthesizing the information from the English passages on non-Chinese topics. The result recommends that except the familiar topics, the teacher can lead the student to read a passage on unfamiliar topic to produce synthesizing retellings as long as the readability of the passage fits English learners’ English reading ability.
- In this study, the researcher recommended another way of summary writing. Teachers may also focus on the summary retelling activity for collapsing a whole paragraph into smaller meaningful chunks, pointing out essential features in each chunk, and then asking learners to integrate the essential features in larger synthesizing statements.
C. Conclusion
In this study, this group of teenagers has proved that they have the ability to retell synthesizing information over familiar and unfamiliar topic passages with the assistance of their prior knowledge.Moreover, the results of the study provide further evidence in the field of prior knowledge studies to ensure the essential impact of the cross-cultural knowledge (Brantmeier, 2005; Hammadou, 2000). More than that, the findings of the study suggest that the reader’s cross-cultural knowledge can facilitate English learners to operate a synthesizing process. In contrast, the result of the study was not in agreement with Cohen et al’s (1988) conclusion that non-natives had more trouble synthesizing the information at the intra- and inter sentential levels as well as across paragraphs than natives. The different result from this study and the classification of synthesizing information can add new knowledge to the field of English learners’ cognitive reading process. In the near future, the researcher will include other groups of English learners with different levels of English reading abilities to further examine the non-natives’ synthesizing process via culturally specific and cross-cultural topic passages.
D. Comment
After reading and trying to understand this journal, I can say that this is a good journal. It stands for some reasons. First, this journal is written systematically and has complete composition / content, also the author biography and references are provided. It means that this journal can be used for academic usage. Second, the method in retelling assessment in this study is slightly different from that of recall. The third reason, then, it provides data of the study and it seems quite valid because in collecting data the researcher asked another PhD student who was a native English speaker as a second rater to ensure the credibility of the analysis. Then, the last reason, but not the least, I said that this is a good journal because this journal provide a study which can give a new finding/result that fix the misunderstanding/restraint in the previous research.
Finally, I suggest to other student to read this journal because this journal provides new knowledge which might be useful for us. After all, this journal uses communicative language and easy to be understood as well.
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