Reading Comprehension Errors by Advanced Learners of Japanese Reading Academic Papers

The Case of Chinese-speaking Graduate Students

Abstract

When native Chinese graduate students in Japan read academic papers written in Japanese, what kinds of errors in reading comprehension do they make? In this study, such students were asked to relate in Chinese their understanding as they read. Their errors fell into the four categories below.

(a) Errors concerning the meanings of vocabulary: They made inappropriate guesses about the meanings of words based on the meanings of the individual kanji characters comprising the word or chose an inappropriate translational equivalent from a dictionary when multiple equivalents were provided.

(b) Errors in parsing sentence structure: They were unable to ascertain which parts of a sentence modified which other parts, or which parts were coordinated with which other parts.

(c) Errors in relating to the greater context: They were unable to identify the referents of elided elements or to appropriately identify the intended references of deictic phrases from context.

(d) Errors in relating the content to background knowledge: They were unable to relate the syntactic structures of the papers and the content described in textual descriptions to their own background knowledge.