A Study Of The Effects Of Text Length And Causal Connectives On Chinese EFL Learners’ On-line Inference Generation During Expository Text Comprehension

This thesis explores the effects of text length and causal connectives on ChineseEFL learners’ on-line inference generation during expository text comprehension.With Chinese EFL learners as participants and expository texts with different lengthsand causal connective situations as experimental materials, the on-line experimentsemployed the method of reading time to examine participants’ on-line inferencegeneration process during expository text comprehension.The results show that text length influences Chinese EFL learners’ on-lineinference generation process during expository text comprehension. Short expositorytexts are conducive to the generation of inferences. That is, the time readers spend inreading the target sentences of short expository texts is significantly shorter than thatspent in reading the target sentences of long expository texts. It is also found thatcausal connectives influence Chinese EFL learners’ on-line inference generationprocess during expository text comprehension. Causal connectives facilitate theinference generation process. That is, readers’ reading time for the target sentences ofexpository texts with causal connectives is significantly shorter than that for the targetsentences of expository texts without causal connectives.This thesis falls into five parts. The introduction provides the research orientation,objectives and outline of this study. Chapter Two theoretically reviews relevanttheories and literature, including definitions of some key concepts, five importantmodels of the inference generation process and factors that affect inferencing. ChapterThree is concerned with the experiment. It describes the participants, materials andprocedures. Chapter Four presents the results and a general discussion of the results. A summarization of the major findings, implications of the study and suggestions forfuture research are explicated in the last chapter.