THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF CONTENT WORDS AND FUNCTION WORDS AS RELATED TO SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY, ENGLISH PROFICIENCY AND FIRST LANGUAGE TRANSFER IN THE READING COMPREHENSION OF ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE (ESL) LEARNERS (ADULT, SPANISH, ARABIC)

This is a study of the reading comprehension of English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. Psycholinguists and teachers alike have been intrigued by the issue of what makes a text difficult to comprehend. The central question in this project was whether a knowledge of the content words in a text could make that text more comprehensible to a learner than a knowledge of the function words in it. The effects of syntactic complexity, a learner's English proficiency and his first language, interacting with the lexical component were also examined.;The overall conclusion from the study is that the knowledge of content words is by far most essential in ESL reading comprehension. The importance of a knowledge of function words or syntactic structure is secondary, especially if a learner's first language is similar to English. While content word knowledge is important, the study has also shown that a learner does not have to know every word in a passage before he can understand it; he can tolerate new content words at the density of about 1 in 9 with no loss in comprehension. There was also some indication that a low English proficiency compounded with the fact that a learner's first language is dissimilar to English will make a learner slightly more dependent on function words in his comprehension, though for every learner, the knowledge of content words is most important.;The study concluded with a proposal for a model of ESL reading comprehension and some pedagogical suggestions.;Subjects read texts controlled for the amount of known content or function words and the degree of syntactic complexity. Two measures of text comprehensibility were obtained: the reader's subjective rating of the difficulty of a text and his score on the multiple-choice questions about that text. Two experiments were conducted. The main experiment involved 33 Spanish-speaking learners of English. Sixteen Arabic speakers participated in the replication. They were all in an intensive ESL programme preparing themselves for academic studies in an American university.