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A Comparative Study Of The Impacts Of Word Frequency And Syntactic Structure On Reading Task Difficulty

Posted on:2010-06-22Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:N LvFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360275483155Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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In the past two decades, task-based language teaching and assessment have become more and more popular. Due to this, a lot of theoretical framework and empirical researches related to task difficulty have emerged prominently. Especially in second language reading researches, by means of investigating the impact of readers'lexical and syntactic knowledge on their reading performance, many empirical researches aimed to explore the effect of these factors on reading task difficulty. However, there were few researches investigating the impact of reading text complexity on second language reading, let alone researches about comparisons among the effect of different text characteristics on reading. This thesis tries to explore the respective effect of word frequency and syntactic structure on reading task difficulty by analyzing and comparing Chinese non-English major postgraduates'performance in different reading tasks and their answers to a questionnaire.This thesis includes two research instruments: reading tests and a questionnaire. In reading tests, the subjects were divided into three groups, with each group taking one version of the reading tasks which is different from that of the other two groups. The first version is the original version of the reading tasks, with the vocabulary and syntactic structures not being modified at all; the second version is the lexically modified version of the reading tasks, with the key words being replaced by their high-frequency synonyms; the third version is the syntactically modified version of the reading tasks, with the complex sentences being changed into simple sentences. Meanwhile, the subjects were also required to underline the words and sentences that blocked their reading comprehension so as to investigate whether it was the modified parts that impeded their reading. Independent t-test shows no significant difference between the performances of SG and OG, but LG presented better performance compared with the other two groups. Besides, according to the underlining by the subjects, the greatest obstacle that hindered their reading comprehension comes from the vocabulary in the texts.The questionnaire used in this research aims to further explore the subjects'reading process and the strategies they adopted to assist their reading. According to the investigation, the answers about the reading task difficulty provided by all the three groups are in line with the results of the reading tests. In addition, the investigation also confirms that vocabulary, especially the width of vocabulary, forms the biggest obstacle for their reading. By contrast, syntactic structure did not have too much influence, while the logic relationship between some sentences and their contexts did have effect to a certain degree. Finally, according to the investigation on the reading strategies, it was found that when the subjects met difficulty in word or sentence comprehension, they were inclined to depend on the context to assist their reading. Hence, the improvement that the subjects need most is the grasp of text structure as a whole, apart from the expansion of vocabulary.The results of this study help syllabus designers and teachers to design and sequence reading tasks properly, and provide reference when they assess readers'performance on reading tasks. Besides, this study verifies the interactive-compensatory model of reading process, and provides some suggestions about teaching reading from an interactive perspective.
Keywords/Search Tags:reading task difficulty, lexical complexity, syntactic complexity
PDF Full Text Request
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