Reading Comprehension Processes Of Japanese Majoring Undergraduate Students Based On Retelling Protocols

Reading is an essential activity in language learning.Generally,Chinese learners of Japanese are said to have a great advantage in reading Japanese due to their knowledge of Chinese characters.Even so,in my experience of learning Japanese,I still encounter problems when reading Japanese texts,such as knowing all the words and sentences but not being able to grasp the overall content of the text,or not understanding the intent of the author.This is the so-called ‘Knowing the language forms while failing to understand the meaning of the content’.What are the reasons for these problems?To address these issues,it is necessary to investigate where and how learners stumble in their reading comprehension.However,reading is a non-visual process,and it is not easy to identify these.One way to visualize the reading process in the mind is through "retelling",defined as "the activity of reading a text and telling it to someone who does not know what it is about,without looking at the text." In recent years,retelling has attracted much attention in the fields of native language education and English education;and has been widely applied in reading research and teaching practice.However,in the field of Japanese language education,although there are practices of incorporating retelling into reading classes,few studies on retelling have been done.Therefore,this study focuses on 24 Japanese majoring undergraduate students(12upper-intermediate and 12 lower-intermediate),exploring the reading errors in the reading process and the impact of retelling on reading comprehension through learners’ Chinese retelling.Regarding the learners’ reading errors,the following nine types of reading errors were identified based on the analysis of the retelling data.Reading errors at the vocabulary level include: Unable to understand words(even already learned)and treating them as unknown words;Incorrectly inferring the meaning of words due to the influence of kanji characters;Overly obsessed with unknown words and ignoring comprehensible information;Incorrect word segmentation.Reading errors at the sentence level include being unable to correctly understand the relationship between clauses and phrases in long sentences;Inappropriate subject identification;Unable to understand the meaning of grammar correctly.Reading errors at the paragraph level include being unable to grasp the logical relationships between paragraphs.These reading errors show that lack of vocabulary knowledge and inappropriate use of Chinese characters negatively affects reading comprehension.And it also reveals a tendency of learners with low reading abilities to overly focus on incomprehensible local information and to focus only on bottom-up processing.Regarding the impact of retelling on comprehension,this study showed that retelling contributed to Japanese text comprehension for learners in both groups.The above results indicate that retelling can identify the reasons why learners fail to understand during their reading comprehension,and they also suggest the possibility of introducing retelling into the Japanese reading classroom.