Investigating the contributions of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies to L2 reading comprehension: an exploratory study

Read Writ (2011) 24:883902

DOI 10.1007/s11145-010-9230-6

Levi McNeil

Published online: 9 April 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract While a number of studies have investigated the inuence of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies on comprehension, no L2 research exists examining and comparing the unique contributions of these two variables examined together. Therefore, the purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the combined and individual contributions of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies to reading comprehension. Data collected from 20 university-level English language learners were analyzed using regression analyses. The results indicated that background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies, operationalized as self-questioning, combined to account for a signicant portion of variance in reading comprehension scores, with self-questioning being a stronger predictor of reading comprehension than background knowledge.

Keywords Second language reading Reading comprehension strategies

Background knowledge

Introduction

Among researchers, there is little dispute that second language (L2) reading is comprised of both bottomup and topdown processes. Within each level of processing, a multitude of factors operate simultaneously to construct meaning. Research shows that L2 reading comprehension is impacted by, among other variables, combinations of L1 reading ability and L2 language knowledge (e.g., Bernhardt & Kamil, 1995; Lee & Schallert, 1997; Song, 1998).

L. McNeil (&)

Graduate School of TESOL, Soonhun 610, Sookmyung Womens University, Hyochangwon-gil 52, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 140-742, South Koreae-mail: [email protected]

Investigating the contributions of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategiesto L2 reading comprehension: an exploratory study

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884 L. McNeil

A current model of second language reading (i.e., Bernhardt, 2005) theorized how these two factors function in concert. Bernhardt depicted precisely the contributions of rst language (L1) reading ability and second language knowledge(i.e., L2 language prociency) to L2 reading. While this model denes the roles of L1 reading ability and L2 language knowledge in L2 reading, it does not attempt to specify the contributions of background knowledge or reading comprehension strategies to L2 reading. Both background knowledge (e.g., Barry & Lazarte, 1995; Chen & Donin, 1997), and the utilization of cognitive and metacognitive reading comprehension strategies (e.g., Phakiti, 2003, 2008) affect L2 reading, but research has yet, to the best of this researchers knowledge, attempted to account for these two variables in the same study. To address this issue, the purpose...