| The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of authentic versus edited texts on lower-level English as a second language (ESL) learners whose first-language backgrounds were Korean and Japanese to analyze quantitative and qualitative data and to examine on-line reading behaviors and reading comprehension.;A total of thirty-eight university-level ESL participants were asked to volunteer for a two-hour session in this study. First, students were asked to read either authentic or simplified text silently. During reading, they were asked to stop at a certain point in the passages and asked to say or think-aloud what they understood from the texts and what they did to understand. Upon completing the procedure, they were instructed to recall everything they could remember from the texts and complete a few open-ended general questions. Lastly, they were interviewed briefly regard their reading behaviors or any pertinent information.;The outcome of this study indicates that multiple comprehension processes lead to equal levels of reading comprehension. Students reading the authentic text, the more difficult passage, used significantly more of bottom-up and metacognitive strategies, but they used the same amount of top-down strategies compared to those reading the edited text. However, their performance data indicated that there was no significant difference of the text types on their comprehension level, based on their recall protocols and responses to the open-ended questions. Additionally, the results indicated that the predominant use of bottom-up strategies did not lead to poor comprehension. Furthermore, first-language background and sex did not have any effects on types of on-line reading behaviors and their level of reading comprehension, except males responded more on the number of correctly responded for the open-ended questions.;On the other hand, the qualitative analyses of individuals' recall protocols indicated that individual students facilitated different strategies in recalling the text information from the passages. Students with highest recall scores recalled key ideas from all seven sections, and some of them appeared to recall additional information based on those key ideas. Whereas those with lowest recall scores recalled a minimum amount of information from a few sections. This study suggested that the think-aloud approach would be an essential tool in language learning situations. The results of this research provided some insights regarding ESL learners' on-line reading behaviors and reading comprehension. |
