抄録
The present study examined EFL readers’ understanding of expository texts, with a particular focus on text explicitness (explicit vs. implicit), familiarity (familiar vs. unfamiliar), and readers’ L2 reading proficiency (high vs. low). Fifty-five Japanese university students who varied in L2 reading proficiency participated in an experiment; after reading familiar and unfamiliar expository texts, participants judged whether three types of recognition sentences had appeared in the texts (sentence recognition task; SRT). The SRT results revealed that both proficiency and familiarity influenced understanding of explicit and implicit information, suggesting that comprehension difficulties associated with these factors emerged at the level of explicit information. In addition, recognition confidence ratings indicated that (a) proficiency effects become more pronounced for implicit ideas, (b) proficient readers have potential to learn implicit ideas from familiar texts, and (c) familiarity effects might outweigh proficiency effects. Based on these findings, reading instructions that accommodate differences in students’ reading proficiency and text familiarity are discussed.
