A Study Of On-line Thematic Inferences Of Chinese EFL Learners During Narrative Text Processing

The dissertation presents a study of Chinese EFL learners' on-line thematic inferential processing as they comprehend a narrative text. This study explored the cognitive processes of thematic inference generation and the factors constraining Chinese EFL learners' on-line thematic inference-making processes during narrative text comprehension. It is specifically designed to address the following three sets of questions: The first set is concerned with the effects of two reader-based factors (i.e., reading ability and working memory span), the second set deals with the effects of two text-based variables (i.e., the title as well as the protagonist's central goal and outcome of the text), and the third one is related to the time course of thematic inferential processing.On the basis of the extant theories and empirical evidence concerning the reading and inferencing processes, the author develops the theoretical framework of the present study. It is assumed that on-line thematic inferences the EFL learners at tertiary level generate correlate significantly with their reading proficiency skills and working memory span; that certain properties of the narrative text, such as the title or the central goal and the outcome of a text impose constraints on generation of on-line thematic inferences; and that skilled and less skilled readers exhibit differences in the time course of thematic inferential processing.In order to test these hypotheses, three groups of reinforcing and mutually complementary experiments aligned to the hypotheses were designed to examine the on-going cognitive processes of L2 narrative text processing, concentrating on the thematic inferential activities, of Chinese EFL learners at tertiary level. The experiments were implemented among first-year non-English major college students at Ocean University of China. The actual number of participants of the five experiments was 72,56,66,64 and 126 respectively.The first group of experiments, Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, assessed the relative contributions of two main functional cognitive capacities to on-line thematic inferences. The results of the experiments support the contention that reading ability...