Effects of ETR Reading Strategy on Chinese Reading Comprehension

[[abstract]]The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of ETR reading strategy on Chinese reading comprehension and to analyze the differences of participants’ learning behaviors and attitudes between two different levels of CFL learners. The participants are Taiwan language center’s students who take the courses named “Beginning Chinese Readings” and “Intermediate Chinese Readings”. We chose three units to proceed the experiment and carried out the ETR (Experience-Text-Relationship) reading strategy into the class. Throughout the discussion, we anticipate the participants could integrate their background knowledge, experiences, and the text to construct their framework of knowledge. The ETR reading strategy is divided into three steps, which are Experience, Text and Relationship. The participants logged in the forum of Moodle (LMS) to answer the questions in order to keep and retain the replies in the Experience and Relationship sequence. According to the experiment results, there are four findings as follow. (1) In the promotion of reading comprehension ability, the difference of pretest and posttest is statistically significant after the implementation of ETR reading strategy. (2) According to the analysis of their replies, the participants of Beginning Chinese Readings create six types of answer, and the participants just retain their experience and text at the beginning. In the unit2 and unit3, they could create more different ideas about the topic; however, the participants of Intermediate Chinese Reading could combine personal experiences, text and extend other concepts in the three units. (3) Viewing the learning behaviors and attitudes, we find the participants of Beginning Chinese Readings took the available information (eg, other participants’ answers or the ideas of texts); nevertheless, the participants of Intermediate Chinese Readings tended to discuss with their classmates before answering the questions. (4) Two classes both agreed the ETR reading strategy could promote their reading comprehension ability with positive attitude, and they are all willing to use this reading strategy to learning Chinese reading courses.