Effects Of Syntactic Parsing Instruction On Chinese College Students' EFL Reading Rates

Foreign language reading serves as the fundamental channel for foreign language acquisition and for information gathering.Improving students' reading abilities is one of the most important objectives of foreign language teaching.Many researchers(e.g.,Grabe&Stoller,2011;Kame'enui&Simmons,2001;Perfetti,1985)claim that reading ability includes two dimensions:reading comprehension and reading rate.Existing research indicates that the majority of readers in English as a foreign language(EFL)contexts read at a rate much slower than first language(L1)readers(Grabe,2009;Fraser,2007).Fluent L1 readers read at a rate between 250-300 words per minute(wpm),while EFL students only read at 80-120 wpm(Grabe,2009),equivalent to the level of English native learners in third or fourth grades.Such slow reading rates have negative effects on foreign language learners,limiting their exposure to a great deal of reading materials and information,and hindering their academic and professional development.However,the instruction of reading rates has long been neglected in foreign language teaching and learning including the Chinese EFL context.Reading researchers have suggested a number of approaches to improving reading rates,such as extensive reading,timed reading,and repeated reading,which are underpinned by respective theories.From an information processing perspective,reading generally involves two components:lower-level information processes(i.e.,word recognition,syntactic parsing,and semantic proposition formation)and higher-level information processes(e.g.,text model of comprehension,situation model of reader interpretation).These two processes are competing for the available cognitive resources.Building automaticity in lower-level processes is necessary to allow readers to allocate more cognitive resources for higher-level processes.Thus,researchers(e.g.,LaBerge&Samuels,1974;Kim et al,1993;Grabe,2009)suggest that instructions should be focused on how to develop lower-level processing abilities in order to enhance reading rate.Regarding lower-level processes,a number of studies have investigated the instructional effects of word recognition,while few studies(e.g.,Kim et al,1993;LeVassuer,2006;Nishida,2017)have explored the instructional effects of of syntactic parsing on reading rates.Syntactic parsing refers to the ability to take in and process words as larger units of structure so that basic grammatical information can be extracted to support clause-level meaning.In the Chinese EFL context,no studies so far have been conducted in this line.A related study,Liu&Thomas(2002),compared the effects of parsed texts and normal texts on reading comprehension and reading rate,but their focus was not on the instructional effects of syntactic parsing.Given the importance of reading rate and the scarcity of related research,the present study intends to explore the effects of syntactic parsing instruction on Chinese college students' EFL reading rates.The participants were 87 freshmen from two intact classes(43 students in the experimental group and 44 in the control group)at a key university in China.A mixed method of quantitative and qualitative designs was adopted.The present study is composed of the preparatory stage and the main study.The preparatory stage concerned the design of instructional materials,the measurements of syntactic parsing ability and reading rate,and the pilot study.The main study included four steps.First,the two groups participated in the reading rate pretest and students in the experimental group was delivered the syntactic parsing ability pretest.Second,syntactic parsing instruction was conducted in the experimental group in which students spent 15 minutes of class sessions on syntactic parsing exercise;students in the control group only received regular college English instruction and no reading rate intervention was involved.Third,a parallel reading rate posttest was administered to the two groups,and the posttest of syntactic parsing ability was delivered to the experimental group.Fourth,a semi-structured interview was conducted to the experimental group,examining their perception of the effects of syntactic parsing instruction.Adequate reading comprehension should be achieved to make reading rate meaningful,so the current study set reading comprehension correct rate at 70%based on related studies.Thus,among 87 participants,11 participants' reading comprehension correct rates were lower than this value,resulting in 76 participants'data used in the reading rate analysis.Two major findings have been revealed.First,there was a close relationship between syntactic parsing and reading rate.The correlation coefficients between syntactic parsing and reading rate were.705 in the pretest and.802 in the posttest.Second,syntactic parsing instruction may have positive effects on some students'reading rates in the experimental group.Significant differences were identified between the two groups(t = 2.324,p = 0.023<0.05),although effect size was medium(Cohen's d= 0.52).Specifically,the reading rates of the control group moved from 133 wpm to 138 wpm(129-147 wpm,the 95%confidence interval).The reading rates of the experimental group increased from 130 wpm to 151 wpm(144-158 wpm).The current study may raise teachers' and students' awareness of the importance of reading rate,facilitate teachers to understand the effects of syntactic parsing on reading rate.Furthermore,this study expands previous research area of reading rate,and inspires researchers and teachers to explore other approaches to improving EFL reading rates.