Relationships between lower-level processing skills and reading comprehension of Korean EFL high school students

Abstract

This study investigated the relationships between lower-level processing skills and L2 reading comprehension. According to the Verbal Efficiency Model, because of the limited capacity of working memory, accurate and efficient lower-level processing is fundamental for fluent higher-level processing and reading comprehension. Based on this model, empirical L1 research has corroborated the importance of automatic lower-level processing skills. However, contrary to the consistently high correlations between lower-level processing skills and reading comprehension among young L1 readers, results have been inconsistent among proficient students. In addition, there has been no extensive research on the subject in L2 and EFL environments, although many L2 readers seem to read texts word-by-word and struggle with comprehension. Thus, this study investigated the relationships among lower-level processing skills and L2 reading comprehension among Korean EFL students. Further, the study explored whether the degree to which lower-level processing skills predict reading comprehension differs depending on the students level of English proficiency. In this study, 213 10th grade Korean high school students performed one reading comprehension test and four tasks designed to evaluate their lower-level processing skills: (1) phonological processing

(2) orthographic processing

(3) semantic access, and (4) syntactic processing. The results indicated that the components of lower-level processing skills were correlated with each other significantly. Particularly, they were correlated strongly when processing efficiency was considered. In addition, the components of lower-level processing skills were associated significantly with reading comprehension, with respect to both accuracy and efficiency. The results also showed that lower-level processing skills accounted to a greater degree for reading comprehension among students with lower proficiency than among those with higher proficiency, although lower-level processing skills did explain a significant degree of reading comprehension among the higher proficiency students. With respect to the components that contribute to reading comprehension, the two groups showed rather different traits. Several possible reasons were provided for these results, and further pedagogical implications were discussed.