Effects Of Reader's L2 Proficiency And Text Imageability On English Text Processing

The present study investigates, within the Construction-Integration theory and Structure Building Framework, the effects of readers' L2 proficiency and text imageability, as well as their interactions, on English text processing when Chinese readers of English try to build up coherent and comprehensive text representations out of scrambled pieces of incomplete situations.Scholars identified two types of texts, i.e. concrete texts and abstract texts, according to their imageability. The former refers to those texts which are easy to form images by readers, while the latter refers to those which are comparatively difficult to create images. A review of the related literature shows that concrete texts may facilitate reading comprehension. However, most of the previous studies have been conducted in a L1 context with native English readers as participants. The field of imageability studies on L2 text comprehension remains seldom explored.Thus, based on previous studies and the implications of Structure Building Framework (SBF) and Construction-Integration theory (CI), three specific predictions, which were verified through a sentence recognition test, were made for our test sentences, reader's language proficiency and text imageability. 64 Chinese EFL readers of three different levels (i.e., low, intermediate and advanced) participated in the investigation. During the study phase of the research, all readers were presented with 24 incomplete situations which were extracted from four different complete situations. All readers were then evaluated in a later sentence recognition test, in which they were asked to identify whether sentences in the recognition list have been presented in the study phase or not. Readers' correct choice percentage and reaction time were subjected to the quantitative analysis of repeated measure.The results of the present study accord with the basic ideas of SBF and CI theory, which state that readers integrate or map the incoming relevant information onto the previous information to create certain kinds of situations or mental representations. Meanwhile, the results confirm our predictions as well, indicating that higher proficiency readers will consciously draw more inferences from the incomplete situations than lower proficiency readers, leading to a better organization of the text materials.Meanwhile, the same tendency appears for text imageability since concrete text is a better facilitator of image formation than abstract text, even though readers are simply provided with scrambled incomplete situations. Thus, readers' language proficiency and text imageability serve the same function in text processing: higher language proficiency or degree of text imageability can ease the difficulties in scrambled text material integration.The findings of the present study shed new light on text material design and reading or listening training. Besides, the conclusions drawn from the study are enlightening in research on both text imageability and situation models in text processing.