The Impact of Text Conditions on Oral Reading Behaviors and Reading Comprehension of American College Chinese as a Foreign Language Learners

Abstract

This study aimed to explore American college intermediate-level Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners’ oral reading behaviors and comprehension under different text conditions. It investigated how college CFL learners approached different orthographic texts in CFL reading. Twenty-one college intermediate-level CFL learners were asked to orally read three different versions of a Chinese text: a text consisting of (a) Chinese characters, (b) pinyin, and (c) Chinese characters with pinyin. Three texts were used in this study. To obtain data, the researcher took running records of the participants’ oral reading and asked them to answer several comprehension questions related to each text. The study’s findings indicated the interactive nature of CFL reading. It also revealed the impacts of text factors and reader factors and how they interacted to influence CFL oral reading and comprehension. The CFL oral reading protocol developed in this study can be used as a valuable tool for assessing and analyzing CFL readers’ oral reading errors and can also help determine the difficulty level of Chinese texts in CFL teaching. The findings from this study offer new insights into the reading processes and strategies employed by CFL readers under different text conditions. The study has important implications for research and teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.