A Study Of The Effect Of Processing Differences On Chinese EFL Learners' Text Comprehension

The present study investigates the extent to which tasks involving processingdifferences in Chinese EFL learners' reading result in differences in performance oncomprehension and examines processing differences in reading between Chinese EFLlearners of different proficiency levels.The subjects of the study were 96 first-year English majors, who were dividedinto two groups in terms of their English scores of the National Entrance Examination.They performed the reading tasks in different processing conditions. Processingdifferences were created by the assignment of two different tasks—writing a summaryof a text and listing the examples in a text. Reading for a summary was considered tobe a deep processing while reading for a list of exampies was considered to be asurface processing. Text comprehension was measured by performance on a set ofcomprehension questions. Materials employed in the present study were taken fromCollege English/Extensive Reading 5 currently used as a textbook by non-Englishmajors.Scores for the comprehension questions were computed as a percentage of correctanswers and processed by the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS version11.0) software. The data analysis generated the following major findings:Firstly, "read to summarize" may produce a better performance on comprchension than "read to provide a list of examples". The possible explanation for this is thatsummary writing requires more mental effort of the learners (and even more for L2learners) in comparison with example listing in accomplishing the reading task. Thisconfirms the strength of the deep/surface distinction made by Abraham and Vann(1996)and Oded and Waiters (2001), and helps to lead to the conclusion that readiag tasksinvolving deep processing may help better understanding.Secondly, the different processing conditions of summary writing and examplelisting by Higher-level Groups have little effect on their reading comprehension, whileLower-level Groups perform better in the condition of summary writing, whichsuggests that summarizing activities are likely to be more effective in facilitatingcomprehension for the learners of lower proficiency level.Thirdly, cross-level and cross-condition comparisons show there is no significantdifference between groups of different levels in both conditions, namely, betweenhigher-level students in example condition and lower-level students in the summarycondition, suggesting that the processing conditions are not necessarily the indicator tothe learners' proficiency level, and it thus follows that for lower-level students,summary writing may facilitate their reading comprehension and for higher-levelstudents, they may be unconsciously constructing their mental models of text evenwhen given a micro-level task like listing examples.The findings have some pedagogical implications for both learners and teachersof EFL reading comprehension. From the perspective of L2 learners, texts should notbe viewed only as samples of language. Learners should be also able to generate macro-ideas and achieve global understanding (i. e., a recognition of textmacro-structure) while reading. From the perspective of EFL teachers, teachingmethodology for L2 reading should include a macro-textual approach. The writing of asummary of main points will help produce a better encoding of the text and thus helpstudents to perform better on subsequent comprehension tasks.