Effects of Reading Goals on Narrative Theme Comprehension

Abstract

In narrative reading, people understand the overall theme of the text as well as the content of the text. However, whether readers can automatically understand the themes or not has not been fully investigated. The aim of the present study is to examine the effects of reading goals on EFL readers' narrative theme comprehension. A total of 64 Japanese undergraduates took part in this study. They were randomly divided into the two reading goals (i.e., reading for theme comprehension/reading for recall) and performed a recall task and a theme comprehension task after reading four narrative passages that included implicit narrative themes. The recall production and the answers for the theme comprehension task were analyzed. The results showed that the participants in the theme comprehension recalled explicit textual information, especially outcome-related information, better than those in the recall condition; thus, this process contributed to comprehension of the narrative theme. These results suggest that, when given a reading goal for narrative theme comprehension, EFL readers understand the theme of the text strategically rather than automatically.