A Experimental Study About The Influence Of Text Signals And Reading Ability On English Reading Comprehension

Reading is a complex and reciprocal course , involving a serial of mental activity, not only letters,words and sentences'understanding but text signify information . Text reading requests the readers instantly process the information when they are reading and whether the information provided formerly experience the conformity, and obtain valuable information in the article finally. In fact, the educational teaching and the real reading process were combined organically together by a lot of factors. What influence reading processing factors, not only by article literature styles, but also with readers'own factors such as reading speed, cognition ways and reading strategies.We usually obtain knowledge and information by reading. Authors of text convey some important ideas and relationships in text through the use of signals. Signals are stylistic writing devices that highlight aspects of semantic content or structural organization in text without communicating additional semantic content. Authors of text convey some important ideas and relationships in text through the use of signals. Such devices may include headings, preview statements, summary statements, pointer words and typographical words. It has been shown to improve recall of relevant content material and to improve performance on problem solving transfer tests, when ideas yield superior recall of main ideas. Other researches point to the magnitude of signaling effects being dependent on the complexity and structure of text or reading abilities, interests or cognitive styles.Text comprehension is on a more complex level of cognitive processing based on word and sentence level. Researchers believe that the most important task for readers in the process of reading is to construct coherent text representation . Since it's impossible for authors express themselves thoroughly simply by explicit information of the text, readers must make inferences according to the text to build coherent text representation. Researchers defined two kinds of inferences: forward inference and backward inference.Many studies of text comprehension and inferences are in the first-language field. To learn the impact of text signals on forward and backward inference in second-language text reading comprehension is much helpful to explore the characteristics L2 reading of Chinese-English bilinguals.There were 2 experiments in the study. 2×3 subject-between design was used in experiment 1 .Participants were Third-year junior high school students. In experiment 1, the impact of text signals on forward and backward inference had been explored. The results showed no significant interaction between reading ability and signals. 2×3 subject-between design was used in experiment 2 as well . The difference from experiment 1 is that Students Recollected what they read at will, according to the recollection performances, we can draw the conclusions that reading ability influent text infer performance. Different reading horizontal reader's inference results exist remarkable difference (both forward inference and backward inferences).The different type's signals had the different influence to reader's inference. Organizational signals significantly improved both forward inference and backward inferences performance. Typographical signals didn't significantly improved backward inference but forward inference performance.