읽기 전 활동 유형이 중학생의 영어 지문 이해도와 흥미도에 미치는 영향

Abstract

The present study sought to investigate (a) the effects of prereading activity and (b) the interaction effects of prereading activity, text type, and reading proficiency on English reading comprehension and motivation of junior high school students. To this end, 160 second graders in five intact classes at a local junior high school in Busan participated in this study. The five intact classes were randomly assigned to a control group or one of four experimental groups. In order to ensure the homogeneity of the five groups in terms of their English reading proficiency and their motivation in English reading, the participants were asked to take a pretest and a pre-questionnaire. The results of two one-way ANOVAs (analysis of variance) showed that the five groups did not significantly differ in terms of their English reading proficiency and their motivation in English reading. Based on the results of the preliminary study of surveying 72 English teachers at junior high schools and analyzing the prereading activities presented in six major junior high school textbooks, four prereading activities were devised: sharing personal experience, pre-questioning, providing visual materials, and vocabulary preteaching. Furthermore, two different text types, expository and narrative texts, were selected given that they are two of the most common text types observed in current secondary English textbooks. The participants in the five groups were further divided into high proficiency and low proficiency group based on the pretest scores. In other words, the participants whose pre reading test scores lay in the 40th highest scores were assigned to the high-proficiency group, while those whose prereading test scores lay in the 40th lowest scores were assigned to the low-proficiency group. The experimental groups were then asked to be engaged in one of the prereading activities for four sessions, and take a post reading comprehension test at the end of each session and a post-questionnaire three days after all the treatment sessions. The control group was asked only to take the posttest and the post-questionnaire at the same time as the experimental groups did. A one-way ANOVA, a two-way ANOVA and a three-way ANOVA with a LSD(Lease Significant Difference) post hoc analysis were conducted to analyze the data collected. The statistical analysis revealed that the five groups statistically differed in the post reading comprehension scores. The post hoc analysis showed that the sharing-experience group received significantly higher scores in the post reading comprehension test than the other four groups did. However, no interaction effects of pre-reading activity, text type, and students' reading proficiency on the students' reading comprehension were observed. Another statistical analysis showed that the five groups were statistically different in the students' motivation in English reading after the treatment sessions were finished. The post hoc analysis revealed that the sharing-experience group and the vocabulary preteaching group received significantly higher scores in the post questionnaire than the other groups did. As in the post reading comprehension scores, no interaction effects of prereading activity, text type, and students' reading proficiency on the students' motivation in English reading were observed. These results suggest that effective prereading activities need to activate personal schemata, rather than general schemata, and to provide meaningful and contextualized vocabulary activities before reading a given text.