| The questions such as 'what is reading?' and 'what is the purpose ofreading?' seem to be foolish to be raised again. Although many researchers at home andabroad have paid a lot of attention to reading in the past centuries, reading is stillperhaps the most thoroughly studied but least understood process in education today.Anyway, teaching of EFL reading in China still need to be discussed widely because tosome extent reading is the main reason students learn the language. Motivated by thequestion asked by Charles Alderson in 1984 whether L2 reading comprehensiondifficulties were a reading problem or a language problem, the author is to study thereading problem in the comprehension process in a simplified way, and to help thelearners and instructors towards their own learning or teaching ways in the light of thisthesis.This thesis was designed to investigate teaching of EFL reading to Chinese collegestudents from the perspective of transfer around the following three key researchquestions:1. Why is there a perpetual tendency that learners can read and understand theindividual words in an English text but not comprehend it integrally? Whatdoes this suggest about the teaching of EFL reading comprehension?2. Is the transfer of mental structure-building skill associated with the level ofsuccess in L2 reading comprehension?3. Is the development of L2 verbal working memory linked the transfer of readingcomprehension skill (and hence structure-building skill) from L1 to L2?Firstly, this paper researched the first question by analyzing the general readingproblems from human factors and the teaching methods and concluded that readingskills should be the main reason. Secondly, the author believed that reading skills can betransferred from L1 to L2, focusing on the common points between the English readingskills and Chinese reading skills under the framework of two hypotheses: the LinguisticThreshold Hypothesis (LTH) and the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis (LIH). And then the empirical study analyzed the possible solution by proving the last twoquestions.The author designed a correlation research consisting of three measures. One isbaseline comprehension measure, another is pro-form resolution measure and the thirdis verbal working memory measure. Two groups of college students (total number: 41)representing two different levels, participated in this study. They werelower-intermediate group of 19 young people from Xi'an Peihua University andupper-intermediate group of 22 graduates from Shaanxi Normal University.The results show that, firstly, these two groups of readers were (a) processing wellat sentence level and comprehending well at text level in L1; (b) processing well atsentence level in L2; and (c) showing patterns of transfer (upper-intermediates) ordifficulty in transfer (lower-intermediates) of reading comprehension skills from L1 toL2 texts. Secondly, the upper-intermediate participants were resolving Immediate andRemote pro-form similarly well in L1 and in L2. The lower-intermediate participantsresolved Immediate and Remote pro-forms well in L1, and resolved Immediatepro-forms well in L2 but significantly worse at resolving Remote pro-forms in L2 thanin L1. Thirdly, the correlations in the analysis show that having a higher verbal WMcorresponds to being better at reading comprehension, for both groups, which issignificantly more the case for the lower-intermediate group. The results can beconcluded in two findings: 1) The transfer of mental structure-building skill isassociated with the level of success in L2 reading comprehension. 2) The developmentof L2 verbal working memory is linked the transfer of reading comprehension skill fromL1 to L2.Although there are limitations in this research, the findings of this study still bearimplications to the teaching of EFL reading. During the study, the author proved thatcritical reading skill would be fairly efficient in the reading classroom and suggestedthat it might be widely encouraged in the EFL reading class. |
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