The Effects of Schemata Activation and L2 Glossing on Reading Comprehension

The Effects of Schemata Activation and L2 Glossing on Reading Comprehension

There is a lot of faith in the idea of providing rhetorical structure and/or background and content information as a pre-reading activity. On the other hand. the available research indicates that providing L2 glosses (written explanations of words and phrases in the text) is usually of no benefit. This paper reexamines the issue of L2 glossing in a way that has never been done before: that is. through extensive glossing. In this study. humanities freshmen (n=138) were divided into three groups: an instruction group that received 10 minutes of pre-reading instruction concerning the rhetorical structure. background and contents of the passage: an L2 gloss group with abundant L2 glosses: and a control. The ANCOVA revealed that the L2 gloss group significantly outperformed the other groups. and contrary to other studies. the instruction group did not outperform the control group despite the fact that the instruction group spent 25 minutes on task compared with 20 minutes on task for the other groups. The reasons for this are examined and the implications are presented.