Reading as Transaction in EFL: A Thematic Analysis.

N

25

Advanced Students; College Students; Context Effect; English (Second Language); Foreign Countries; Higher Education; Instructional Innovation; Interviews; Learning Strategies; Oral Language; Reading Comprehension; Reading Processes; Reading Writing Relationship; Second Language Instruction; Second Language Learning; Self Evaluation (Individuals); Short Stories; Teaching Methods

The purpose of this study is to investigate how ten advanced Taiwanese English as a Foreign Language college students comprehend and interpret two English short stories--"The Discus Thrower" and "A Passage to India." Two types of data were gathered for this study: verbal self-reporting and post-reading responses. Oral interviews were used to analyze, interpret, generate themes, and to generally debrief the participants. Based on this analysis, four themes on reading emerged (sense-making, communication, reflexivity, and recontextualization) and are discussed in depth. Sense-making deals with how the participants made sense of the texts by searching for meaning flexibly and inflexibly. Communication deals with how they handled reading dissatisfaction and suspense. Reflexivity deals with situations where participants reflected upon themselves as in their roles as readers, thinkers, and learners. During recontextualization, participants changed their interpretations, previous understandings, and reading stances while they re-read the texts. Conclusions are fourfold: teachers should respect students' meaning-making of the texts and try not to impart their own interpretations; the reader response approach should include ungraded journals and free-writing as well as oral reflection; students should be encouraged to embrace difficulty, ambiguity, confusion, and divergence and not shun them; the level of reader flexibility is itself rather flexible, varying with the readers' orientations, assumptions, and beliefs from one text to the next. Two appendices containing the two English short stories, are included. (Contains 28 references.) (Author/KFT)

2000

ED437855