A Investigation Of The Comprehension Monitoring Ability In Chinese Reading Of L2 Learners

This paper is to examine the comprehension monitoring ability of overseas students when they read in Chinese. Comprehension monitoring plays a very important role both in native reading and in CSL reading. Successful reading comprehension depends not only on the readers' ability to access appropriate content and formal schemata, but also depends on their ability to monitor what they understand and to take appropriate strategic action.Comprehension monitoring is the ongoing activity of evaluating and regulating one's understanding of written text. Beyond basic decoding, it constitutes a cluster of essential skills that underlie successful reading. But in CSL reading research it has tended to be neglected.In this paper, a reading test and a questionnaire were used to get the information about overseas students' comprehension monitoring ability in Chinese reading. The results showed that:(a) Overseas students' comprehension monitoring ability in Chinese reading has reached a certain extent; the comprehension monitoring ability develops rapidly between Grade1to Grade2, when it comes to Grade 2 to Grade3, the development is not so rapid; students in Grade3 score the highest in comprehension monitoring ability test.(b) Be viewed from all the aspects and aspects in Grade1-2, there is always a very close and inherent relation between overseas students' comprehension monitoring ability in reading and reading comprehension.(c) Overseas students have a good awareness to monitor their comprehension in reading and they can take appropriate actions to repair their comprehension gaps.(d) In order to improve the overseas students' comprehension monitoring ability in Chinese reading, some measures such as to encourage students to make self-question, to pay attention to the organization of the text, and teaching them some comprehension monitoring strategies, could be made.