The Effect on Japanese EFL Learners' Reading Ability of Interactive Reading, Enriching Content Schema and Formal Schema : In the Case of Nursing Students

抄録

The purpose of this study is to clarify the effect on Japanese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' reading ability of interactive reading, enriching content schema and formal schema in comparison with grammar translation reading. The subjects were ninety-three first-year nursing students at a four-year college in Niigata. The number of subjects in the experimental group was forty-six and in the control group forty-seven. The experimental group first enriched their content schema and formal schema with regard to the nursing text through the Internet and the teacher's instruction, and then employed interactive reading of the text by concentrating on using bottom-up and top-down processing interactively. In contrast the control group read the text concentrating on using bottom-up processing with a dictionary, and then received instruction through word-for-word translation of each sentence and its grammatical explanation. The results of this study indicated that although both groups improved their reading ability, the experimental group statistically improved their reading ability more than the control group.