The Impact Of Reading Purpose On The Choice Of Text Processing Strategies In Chinese EFL Context

This study investigates the impact of Chinese EFL readers' reading purposes on their choice of text processing strategies. In addition, the effects of text processing strategies and reading purposes on written recall and reading comprehension tests has also been probed into.In L1 reading research, it has been acknowledged that readers' reading purposes do affect their choice of reading strategies as well as their reading outcome. But in L2 or EFL reading research, there isn't any study that devoted specifically and systematically to the factor of reading purpose and its relation to reading strategies and reading comprehension. Therefore, based on previous reading research in LI and L2 context, the experimenter develops the theoretical framework of the present study and works out a classification of three reading strategies, with a focus on the latter two text processing strategies: global text processing strategies and local text processing strategies.The experiment was implemented among 18 Grade Two non-English major college students. They were assigned into two groups according to their primary non-classroom reading purpose: reading for getting information group (N = 9) and reading for improving language proficiency group (N = 9). The subjects in these two groups are on the similar language proficiency level. All the subjects were asked to think-aloud while reading a text sentence by sentence and they were also asked to write their recall of the text information after they had finished reading the text. A reading comprehension test based on the text they read and a reading proficiency test testing their overall reading proficiency were given successively about a month after the think-aloud and written recall protocols.The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data point to three major findings of this study: Firstly, readers with the purpose for getting information inreading English texts made more use of global text processing strategies, directing their attention more to the overall understanding of the text, while readers who read English texts mainly for improving language proficiency adopted more local text processing strategies, focusing more on solving language problems at word or sentence level. Secondly, readers who used more global text processing strategies were able to memorize more macro-idea units, and as a result, they outperformed those who relied heavily on local text processing strategies in both written recall and reading comprehension test. Thirdly, although readers' different reading purposes were found to be related to their achievement in reading comprehension tests, it failed to discover any significant relationship between readers' reading purposes and numbers of macro-idea units remembered as well as their performance in written recall.These findings suggest that Chinese EFL readers' reading purpose has a significant impact on their use of text processing strategies and on their recall and reading comprehension of the text being processed.