Abstract
Many studies of L2 reading have used the learner's native language as the measurement language to estimate the learner's text understanding. In order to examine the effect of the measurement language, the present study used the recognition task with both native and target language and compared EFL learners' responses to the explicit and implicit information of a text. The results revealed that recognition rates are different between the native language (Japanese) and the target language (English). In addition, the extent of these recognition rate differences between languages varies according to recognition sentence types. These results suggested that the difficulty in recognizing inference sentences may be caused by readers' dependence on literal English expressions, implying that learners tend to pay attention to the words and phrases that appeared in a text when they recognized the inference sentences, even if they understood the implicit information.
