2009 Volume 52 Issue 2 Pages 49-59
The present study examines the effects of pre-reading question quality and reading time durations on the recall and comprehension of an explanatory text. The participants were junior high-school students (Experiment 1) and university students (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, there were three question conditions (direct sentence-related, indirect sentence-related, or no question but longer reading time), and four question conditions in Experiment 2 (with a “no question and same reading time” condition added to those of Experiment 1). In both experiments, a free-recall test and a comprehension test were adopted under both immediate and delayed conditions as dependent measures. The major findings are as follows: (1)The effects of question type and reading time duration differed between the junior high-school students and the university students for each test. (2)Indirect sentence-related questions facilitated reading comprehension and recall for the university students, although this trend was partial and weak. The tendency was not observed for the junior high-school student. (3)The longer reading time was effective for both the junior high-school students and the university students in terms of understanding the text conclusion. However, understanding for the initial part of the text was not influenced by the type of the pre-reading questions or by the longer reading time. These results are discussed from the perspectives of language proficiency of readers and the test task. The findings of the study suggest that pre-reading questions that ask junior high-school students to respond with information concerning the conclusion part of a text can be important for enhancing their reading comprehension.
