Reader Factors And Foreign Language Reading

The factors that affect reading include language factors and non-language factors. Language factors relate to reading material, including the lexical items used, syntax, topic, etc.. Non-language factors include reader factors and situationai factors. Reader factors refer to reader's motivation and interest in reading, his intelligence and language proficiency, prior knowledge, etc. Situationai factors refer to the social and physical situation of reading activity. According to the Interactive Model of reading, reading is the process in which all these factors interact with each other.This paper is a study on thice of the reader factors and how they affect reading. 1. Background knowledge is essential in understanding a text. According to schema theory, a text does not carry meaning by itself. Rather, it only provides directions for readers as to how they should construct meaning from their own previously acquired knowledge. 2. While researchers have different opinions on how much language proficiency affects FL or SL reading, their findings indicate that basic language competence is involved in reading comprehension and FL proficiency ceiling may restrict the degree to which good reading skills are applied to FL reading. 3. Reading skills play an important role in reading. In this point, the researchers are interested in whether the NL reading abilities that an SL or FL reader has already processed will transfer to his SL or FL reading. One point that has been agreed on is there is certain tendency to transfer from NL to SL or FL reading (Block, 1986; Carson et al., 1990). Perkins et al. (1989) find that there is a significant correlation between NL and FL reading comprehension. Wang Chuming et al. (1992:1 73) consider that it is necessary to research into each component of reading, and even comprehension may be furtherdivided to reveal the secret of high-level comprehension. Researches done abroad are mainly SL studies. Therefore, the result may not be suitable for Chinese FL learners. The researchers at home mostly take English majors as their subjects. Moreover, in their experiment, questions to test reading comprehension vary in difficulty梩here are simple fact-finding ones as well as demanding high-level ones. This writer thinks that comprehension questions different in difficulty require different cognitive ability and language proficiency from readers. Therefore, it is necessary to deal with them respectively.This experiment is based on the research work done by Perkins et al. (1989) and Wang Churning et al. (1992), but it goes further. It uses non-English major college students as subjects, and takes such factors of subjects' as variables: language proficiency, reading speed, and the ability to make inference standing for reading comprehension, and it controls such variables as background knowledge, motivation and sense of participation. Data of the six items are analyzed by Pearson correlation procedure in SPSS software to gain the overall correlation matrix. Then, they are respectively put in order to get six highest groups and six lowest groups for further investigation into the changes of their correlation. The writer gives her analysis on the indication of these data. The result shows that in general, there exists a tendency to transfer between Chinese and English reading speed(r=.56**); but the transfer of reading speed shows difference by degrees on different levels of English language proficiency, Chinese and English reading speed and reading comprehension; there is no significant tendency of transfer between English and Chinese reading on high-level comprehension(r=.04); reading in Chinese is mainly a problem of reading skills; English language proficiency makes significant difference in English reading speed and comprehension; reading in English is both a problem oflanguage proficiency and reading skills.Based on the study of FL proficiency and FL reading, the writer thinks that large amount of exposure to written material is an approach to impr...