Researching The Effect Of Modified Input On L2 Reading Comprehension

It has been a long time that Chinese teachers and compliers of textbooks are laying emphasis on developing students' reading comprehension in English. The study intends to apply Krashen's "comprehensible input theory" to the second language reading in which written input is needed most.Based on the comprehensible input and other previous researching studies on reading input, the author developed a study framework which focuses on the modification of the comprehensible input in terms of syntactic complexity.The experiment was implemented among 60 grade one non-English major college students who are at the same reading proficiency. They are divided into three groups to read passages at three syntactic complexity levels (namely: 9W/T, 12W/T and 16 W/T). Multiple-choice tests based on the passages they read were given. Then they were also required to write their recall of two of the text they read. The scores of multiple-choice tests and the written recall data are analyzed to find out to what extent modified input affect the readers' comprehension.The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data reveal three major findings of this study: Firstly, the modification of inputs does affect L2 learners' comprehension. There is a negative correlation between the Learners' reading comprehension outcome in multiple-choice tests and the complexity of the inputs. Learners tend to get lower scores when provided with inputs with more complex syntactic structures. Secondly, when the readers are provided with inputs modified at three levels of syntactic complexity, being 9 W/T, 12 W/T and 16 W/T respectively, the readers provided with inputs at 12 W/T level reflects a better understanding of the inputs, their performances well reflect their overall reading proficiency. Thirdly, the modification on input at 9W/T and 12W/T complexity level doesn't affect L2 learners' understanding of the overall meaning of the...