A Study on the Characteristics of Reading Strategies Employed by Japanease High School Students in Different Grades : On the Comprehension of Expository Text

Abstract

In the field of reading research, the role of reading strategies has attracted attention both in L1 and L2. Most research points out that good readers can make use of certain strategies that poor readers cannot utilize. Therefore, studying the use of reading strategies employed by Japanese EFL learners in advance will be necessary to teach them the techniques they need in order to better understand English text. The purposes of this research are (1) To clarify the characteristics of reading strategies employed by Japanese high school students, and (2) To find the differences in the use of those reading strategies between tenth-grade students and twelfth-grade students who are more accustomed to reading English than tent-hgraders. 163 Japanese high school students, 78 tenth-grade students and 85 twelfth-grade students, read the same typical expository text to raise their awareness about reading strategies. After reading the text, they answered a questionnaire using a 1-5 Likert Scale(1=strongly disagree, 5=strongly agree). Then, factor analysis was performed on the data obtained from the questionnaire. Six factors were extracted and were named respectively. Further analysis using ANOVA clarified that (1) twelfth-grade students are more analytic and pay more attention to the structural aspect of English than tenth-graders when reading an expository prose, and (2) Twelfth-grade students are less conscious of their emotion and opinions than tenth-grade students when they read an expository prose. These results reflect the importance of having a solid grounding in bottom-up processing in L2 reading. As for the effects of cognizance of one's own emotions and opinions in reading an expository text in L2, further research considering the learners' proficiency level, text type, and the purpose of reading will be necessary.