Learning from the L2 Expository Text

Learning from the L2 Expository Text

This study questioned what happens in L2 reading compreherision of the expository text, as measured by recall and inference-making abilities, when a L2 reader was induced to develop a content schema about the topic of a target text, but the structure of that schema departs from the structure of the target text Seventy-four Korean university students read either the same version text twice (consistent condition) or two different version texts (inconsistent condition) with a three-day interval between the two readings. The results of a verification test indicate that, for those subjects with higher L2 reading proficiency, the inconsistent condition was more beneficial than the consistent condition for the inference-making task. On the other hand, for lower-level L2 readers, the consistent condition was more favorable for the recall task. It was concluded that inducing a structurally inconsistent schema through an L2 pre-reading would be beneficial only when the reader's L2 linguistic ability is proficient enough to produce necessary propositions from the pre-reading.