Embedded Clause Effects on Recall: Does High Prior Knowledge of Content Domain Overcome Syntactic Complexity in Students of Spanish?

Effects of Reader's Knowledge, Text Type, and Test Type on L1 and L2 Reading Comprehension in Spanish

“…For the present study, each English version of each passage was assessed for syntactic complexity following Barry and Lazarte's (1995) rubric. 4 See Table 1 for a list of numbers of words and clauses in each version of the two passages.…”

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

“…A number of L2 investigations have explored and reported the benefits of background knowledge for specific disciplines (e.g., Barry & Lazarte, 1995;Chen & Donin, 1997;Clapham, 1996;Uso-Juan, 2006) and cultures (e.g., Alptekin, 2006;Lee, 2007;Yuet Hung Chan, 2003). In these studies, the topic of the text was highly specialized to particular subjects or cultures and students seemed to have had many real-life experiences with these topics.…”

“…For example, some studies examined background knowledge in terms of the culture represented in the text and found that when readers were familiar with that culture, they scored significantly better on comprehension measures (e.g., Alptekin, 2006;Johnson, 1981Johnson, , 1982Lee, 2007;Steffensen, Joag-dev, & Anderson, 1979). In addition to cultural topics, studies have reported the positive impact of disciplinerelated background knowledge on discipline-related reading performance (e.g., Alderson & Urquhart, 1985;Barry & Lazarte, 1995;Chen & Donin, 1997;Clapham, 1996). Furthermore, research examining learners' knowledge of general topics such as movies and weather (Al-Shumaimeri, 2006), gender specific topics (Bugel & Buunk, 1996), and sports (Levine & Hause, 1985) report similarly significant findings for the positive role of background knowledge in reading comprehension.…”

“…While this model defines 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, 2003Phakiti, , 2008 affect L2 reading, but research has yet, to the best of this researcher's knowledge, attempted to account for these two variables in the same study. To address this issue, the purpose of this study was to examine the combined and individual contributions of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies to L2 reading.…”

The relation between time spent on the written recall task and the memory of L2 text

“…The examination of L2 reading studies that employed the recall assessment task revealed that research has varied in terms of the time allowed for doing the recall task. As seen in Table 1, while some researchers allowed the participants to read and recall at their own pace (e.g., Allen et al, 1988;Barry & Lazarte, 1995;Barry & Lazarte, 1998;Bernhardt, 1983;Chen & Donin, 1997;Connor, 1984;Donin & Silva, 1993;Horiba, 1996a, b;Horiba et al, 1993;Riley & Lee, 1996;Sadoski et al, 2000;Schraw, 1998;Stott, 2004;Young, 1999), others set a certain time limit and asked the participants to finish the task within the time limit (e.g., Baylor & McCormick, 2003;Chu et al, 2002;Davis et al, 1988;Ghaith & Harkouss, 2003;Kim, 1995;Sadoski et al, 1995).…”