A Study on the Effects of Text Difficulty Levels on Reading Strategies Employed by Japanese EFL learners

Abstract

In this study, the effects of passage difficulty level on reading strategies employed by Japanese EFL learners were examined. Two passages of different readability levels (10th-grade level and 6th-grade level by the Flesch formula) with the same content and length were prepared by rewriting the original expository text from an ESL reading textbook. The original passage concerning the psychology of shoppers, which is at the 10th-grade level, was carefully selected in order that all the subjects in this experiment would have equal background knowledge on the topic. Using easier vocabulary and grammatical constructions constituted the easier version of the passage, which is at the 6th-grade level. 210 Japanese high school students were divided into two groups: Group R10 read the original passage and Group R6 read the rewritten and easier passage. The two groups of students answered the same questionnaire on reading strategies that used a 1-5 Likert Scale(1=strongly disagree, 5=strongly agree) after reading their passages of different readability respectively. As a result of a factor analysis performed on the obtained data, five factors were identified and were named respectively, further analysis using ANOVA revealed that (1) students who read the easier passage(R6) had a better understanding of the structural aspects of the text, and (2) students who read the original but difficult passage(R10) were more focused on the information in the text. These results reflect the difficulty that EFL learners have in bottom-up processing and imply that acquiring a certain level of ability in bottom-up processing is necessary to use top-down processing skills effectively in EFL reading comprehension.