The Effect Of Syntactic Modification On The Reading Comprehension Of Non-English Majors

In recent years, many researchers have studied the effect of input modification onEFL students reading comprehension. However, their research results on whether inputmodification actually increases comprehension are inconsistent. Furthermore, there arefew researches on the effect of syntactic modification on reading comprehension.The present study tends to investigate the effect of syntactic modification on thereading comprehension of Chinese EFL learners, with theories of readingcomprehension, Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, and the foreigner talk discourse as itstheoretical basis. The theories of reading involve the nature and classification of readingcomprehension. Input Hypothesis and features of foreigner talk discourse indicate therelationship between modified input and reading comprehension. After reviewingprevious empirical studies, three research questions of the present study are put forward:1）Do syntactic simplification and syntactic elaboration influence Chinese EFLstudents’ reading comprehension?2) Compared with the baseline version, what effect do syntactic simplification andelaboration have on reading comprehension of Chinese EFL students at differentEnglish proficiency levels?3) Will there be an interaction effect of modification type and Chinese EFLstudents’ English proficiency level on their reading comprehension?To answer these research questions, a reading test was designed. The readingmaterials, which were four passages selected from reading passages of CET-4, weremodified into syntactically simplified version and syntactically elaborated version. Thesimplified version deleted some sentence elements or morphological inflections, so itwas composed of short and simple sentences. The elaborated version maintained muchof the original syntactic complexity, but increased text comprehensibility by way ofadding redundancy through repetition, paraphrasing sentences containing complexsyntactic structures and providing definition of difficult items. So there were threeversions of passages: baseline version, simplified version and elaborated version.Vocabulary and content of three versions were constant, but sentence structures varied.The syntactic complexity of the three versions was measured by words per T-unit andS-nodes per T-unit.12students participated in pilot study, so they were excluded fromthe main study. The pilot study was to examine whether the passages and the questions prepared for the main test were suitable to the subjects and to check the testing time.The other172non-English majors participated in the main test, and they were dividedinto high proficiency group and low proficiency group according to their scores ofCET-4. But in order to maintain clear distinctions between the HP and LP groups,120subjects’ performance was used in the statistical analyses, with60at high proficiencylevel and60at low proficiency level. They were divided into three groups: one controlgroup and two experimental groups. In the test, the control group read the baselineversion while the two experimental groups were assigned to read the simplified versionand the elaborated version respectively. After reading, they were required to complete20multiple choice questions.Through quantitative analyses of the data, the major findings can be summarized asfollows:1) Both syntactic simplification and syntactic elaboration facilitated Chinese EFLstudents’ reading comprehension.2) Compared with the baseline version, syntactic simplification facilitated thereading comprehension of students at high proficiency level. But students at lowproficiency level did not significantly benefit from syntactic simplification. Syntacticelaboration could facilitate the reading comprehension of students at both high and lowproficiency levels.3) There was no interaction effect of modification type and students’ Englishproficiency on their reading comprehension.Findings of the present study provide suggestions for teaching of English readingin China and recommendations for future research on the related fields.