Effects of Text Modification and Text Complexity of a Literary Text on Reading Comprehension in Korean EFL Context
So Yeon Kim · Studies in English Education · 2015
Text complexity and text modification have been vigorously investigated for a few decades in order to provide learners with appropriate texts to read. As for the text complexities, the qualitative aspects of texts, reader and task factors have drawn attention in addition to the quantitative features of texts as an element of text complexity. This stream is based on the studies which found the pros and cons of the conventional ways which only measure the quantitative aspects of text complexity. As for modification, elaboration has emerged to complement the shortcomings of simplification. Based on this newly rising alternative in the field of text complexity and modification, the present study researched the relationship between text complexity, text modification and reading comprehension. 137 Korean high school students read three types of a literary text, original, simplified, andelaborated texts, and completed a worksheet to measure their readingcomprehension. Their English proficiency levels and genre motivation levels of reading literary texts were also included as variables. It was found that high school students benefited significantly more from the simplified text than from the original text regardless of their English proficiency levels. In addition, only students with high motivation performed significantly better when reading both the simplified text and elaborated text than when reading the original text. Thus, the effects of modification of different quantitative and qualitative text complexity on reading literary texts may vary based on reader’s proficiency and motivation levels.