Effects Of Capitalization On English Reading Of Chinese Students

Capitalization refers to the action of writing or printing in capital letters or with an initial capital(Oxford English Dictionary,1989).In English,capitalization plays an important role in grammar and rhetoric.Chinese,a logographic language,does not have capital letters.There is a common phenomenon that Chinese students have much difficulty in reading all-capital texts.Thus,this study aims to investigate the effects of capitalization on English reading of Chinese students through an eye-movement experiment.Moreover,contrasts are made between English and non-English majors in their reading.This study endeavors to answer the following questions:(1)In comparison with the Normal texts,what are the eye-movement characteristics of Chinese students reading the All-letter-capitalized and All-initial-capitalized texts? And what are the reasons for these characteristics?(2)In terms of eye-movement measures,what are the differences between English and non-English majors? And what are the reasons for these differences?(3)What suggestions can be made to deal with capital letter reading? And what suggestions can be offered to English and non-English majors respectively?This study was 3(‘Text condition’: word,phrase and sentence reading)× 3(‘Text type’: the All-letter-capitalized,All-initial-capitalized and Normal texts)× 2(‘Subject group’: English and non-English majors)factors mix designing.In consideration of subjects’ familiarity with the contents,number of letters/characters,frequency(for words),number of spaces(for phrases),idiomaticity and diversity(for sentences),as well as the accuracy rate acquired from the pretest,18 words,12 phrases and 9sentences were selected as experimental materials.A total of 46 college students aged between 18 and 22 were recruited as subjects,and 43 valid samples were finally collected from 21 English majors and 22 non-English majors.Eye-movement data were processed with a multivariate analysis of variance,followed by Bonferroni adjusted post-hoc tests.Six eye-movement measures are adopted for analyses and discussion,including fixation count,total fixation duration,progressive saccade count,regressive saccade count,mean saccade amplitude(only for sentences)and total reading time.Major findings of this study are:(1)The two-way ‘Text condition × Text type’ interaction and two-way ‘Text condition × Subject group’ interaction are significant.Nevertheless,it seems that capitalization poses a similar degree of challenge to both English and non-English majors,so the two-way ‘Text type × Subject group’ interaction and three-way ‘Text condition × Text type × Subject group’ interaction are not significant.(2)Reading the All-letter-capitalized texts has the characteristics of heavy cognitive load,difficult cognitive processing and low reading efficiency.These characteristics may be attributed to case conversion in reading all-capital texts,little attention paid to capitalization and averagely higher letters in these texts.Furthermore,with the number of capital letters increasing,the gap narrows down between the All-initial-capitalized and All-letter-capitalized texts.(3)Whether on word,phrase or sentence condition,English majors are more proficient in English reading than non-English majors,because they are good at extracting information from English texts and make full use of logical thinking in English reading.