Abstract
The present study examined effects of two kinds of familiarity (inference ideas and text content) and L2 reading proficiency on EFL readers' on-line (i.e., during-reading) causal inference generation from expository texts. Fifty-five Japanese university students participated in the experiment and read texts that varied in familiarity: Familiar (FA), Partially Unfamiliar (PU), and Unfamiliar (UF). The combined measure of reading times for target sentences and response times for inference questions revealed that low-proficiency readers failed to make on-line causal inferences regardless of familiarity condition, but high-proficiency readers made the inferences during the reading of FA and PU texts. In addition, error rates for inference questions suggest that low-proficiency readers generated the inferences when answering a question, that is, when the task required them to do so. Together, these findings reveal the conditions in which EFL readers make causal inferences during expository reading. Pedagogical implications are discussed in terms of the interplay between the reader and text.
