International Forum on Frontier Issues in Applied Linguistics (al2020)

5 / 2020-06-04 08:42:16

The Potential Effect of Level of Difficulty of Reading Strategy on Its Usage Among EFL Learners

reading；strategy；effect；EFL learners

Forum on Frontier Issues in Applied Linguistics > language assessment and testing

In L2 or foreign language reading research, it is common to make a distinction between different levels of understanding. It has long been studied whether the cognitive difficulty of these different levels of understanding would increase with the rise of the levels. Reading strategies, an important part of second language/foreign language reading, are also frequently been grouped into different categories by researchers. However, there have been few studies on whether different reading strategies also have different levels of difficulty, and whether different levels of difficulty of reading strategies would have a potential impact on learners’ use of reading strategies. Employing the reading strategy scale of CSE (China’s standards of English language ability) and Rasch model analysis, this study analyzed and investigated the difficulty levels of different reading strategies and their potential impact on college students’ use of reading strategies. The results showed that the bottom-up strategies of cognitive strategy were more difficult than the top-down strategies, and the evaluation strategies of metacognitive strategy were the most difficult strategies. In addition, there was a significant negative correlation between the difficulty of strategy and the frequency of strategy use, indicating that the difficulty of reading strategies will also affect the use of strategies apart from learners’ personal attributes (e.g., language level, gender, motivation, etc.), In the future, strategy-related teaching needs to pay more attention to difficult reading strategies.