The Effects Of Syntactic Simplification And Elaboration On Chinese EFL Non-English Majors' Reading Comprehension

It has been a long time that considerable attention has been given to the effect of input modification on EFL students reading comprehension. However, research results on whether it actually increases comprehension are inconsistent. Furthermore, few of which have investigated the effect of syntactic modification on reading comprehension.The present study, which is on the basis of the theory of reading, Krashen's Input Hypothesis, and the foreigner talk discourse, is intended to explore the effect of syntactic modification on the reading comprehension of Chinese-speaking non-English majors. The reading theory accounts for the nature and model of reading comprehension. Input Hypothesis and the characteristic of foreigner talk discourse state the relationship between modified input and reading comprehension. The following research questions were put forward after a review of previous empirical studies: 1) Compared with unmodified baseline passage, what effect does syntactic simplified passage have on reading comprehension of Chinese EFL students at different English proficiency level? 2) Compared with unmodified baseline passage, what effect does syntactic elaborated passage have on reading comprehension of Chinese EFL students at different English proficiency level? 3) Which one is more effective on Chinese EFL students'reading comprehension, syntactic simplification or syntactic elaboration? 4) Will there be an interaction effect of input modification type and students'English proficiency level on their reading comprehension?To answer these research questions, a reading test was designed. The reading materials, which were four passages selected from CET4 before 1996, were modified in the direction of syntactic simplification and syntactic modification. The simplified version contains shorter utterances, simpler syntax than what appeared in the baseline passages, delete sentence elements or morphological inflections, and prefer canonical word order. The elaborated version keeps the sentence structure that maintains much of the original syntactic complexity, but attempts to increase text comprehensibility by way of adding redundancy through repetition, paraphrasing sentences containing complex syntactic structures or providing definition of difficult vocabulary items in the original. With the original passages, there are three versions of reading passages: baseline version, simplified version and elaborated version. Among the three versions, vocabulary and content are held constant while sentence structures varied. The syntactic complexity of the three versions is measured by T-unit analysis.120 second-year Chinese-speaking non-English majors, who participated in the experiment, with 60 at high proficiency level and 60 at low proficiency level, were divided into three groups: one control group and two experimental groups, which were homogenous. In the reading test, each group only read one version of the four passages. The control group read the baseline version while the two experimental groups were assigned to respectively read the simplified version and the elaborated version. Comprehension was measured by the same 20 multiple choice questions. The raw scores of the 120 students constituted the data set for the study. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data reveal three major findings of this study: 1) Syntactic simplified input and syntactic elaborated input both facilitated Chinese EFL students'reading comprehension. Students at both high and low proficiency levels significantly benefited from elaborated input, but students at low proficiency did not significantly benefited from simplified input. 2) Syntactic simplified input was comparable to syntactic elaborated input for students at both proficiency levels; they did not differ significantly with each other. 3) There was no evidence of interaction between syntactic modification and students'proficiency.These findings suggest that syntactic modification can facilitate Chinese EFL students'reading comprehension and syntactic elaboration is superior to syntactic simplification if all the factors are taken into consideration.The implications of the findings for Chinese reading teaching are also discussed in the study. And limitations of the present study and recommendations for future research on the related issues are also proposed.