Chinese EFL College Students' Beliefs about Reading and Reading Strategies in L1 and L2

[[abstract]]ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to examine learners’ beliefs about reading and reading strategies in L1 and L2. Four hundred and thirty-two Taiwanese college students participated in this study. The primary concern was to investigate whether learners’ beliefs about reading relate to their use of reading strategy in L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English) when reading for academic purposes. Readers’ beliefs were investigated in terms of the two implicit models of reading, the transaction and transmission beliefs. Four major research questions were addressed in the study. The first research question concerned students’ beliefs about reading in L1 and L2. The second inquiry attempted to compare students’ reported use of reading strategies between languages. The third question intended to investigate whether learners’ beliefs about reading were related to their reported use of reading strategies in L1 and L2. To address these three questions, four measurement questionnaires were developed in this study to collect data. Lastly, since the fourth research question aimed to examine whether students with distinctive beliefs about reading in the two languages show any differences in how they process texts, the think-aloud method was used to collect information about students’ actual use of reading strategies. The findings of the study were: (1) Students showed somewhat different reading belief patterns between L1 and L2. More specifically, when reading in L1, students tended to hold stronger transaction than transmission beliefs. On the other hand, when reading in L2, students were found to show differential strengths of two kinds of transaction beliefs identified in the study, with stronger endorsement to Transaction I beliefs (i.e. Reader Interpretation) than to Transaction II beliefs (i.e. Reader Engagement); no difference was found, however, between students’ Transaction II and Transmission beliefs. Furthermore, in general, students were found to hold stronger beliefs about reading in L1 than in L2, either transaction or transmission beliefs. (2) Both similarities and differences were found in students’ reported use of reading strategies between L1 and L2. Concerning the similarities between the languages, three strategies including using tables and pictures, linking content with what one already knows, and re-reading were found to be frequently used by students no matter whether they read in L1 or L2. As for the differences, students reportedly applied significantly more reading strategies in L1 than in L2. Moreover, while students reportedly used a significantly higher amount of general strategies when reading in L1, they tended to apply a significantly larger proportion of non-general strategies when reading in L2. (3) Students’ beliefs about reading and their reported use of strategies were found to be positively correlated in either L1 or L2. More specifically, both transaction and transmission beliefs were significantly correlated with the two reading strategy categories (i.e. general versus non-general). Regarding the reported uses of strategies by readers with distinctive belief types, even though there was a tendency for readers with strong transaction beliefs to report more use of reading strategies than those with strong transmission beliefs in either L1 or L2, the differences among groups were not statistically significant. (4) The qualitative results of the study have revealed that students with distinctive belief types in both languages seemed to exhibit distinctive patterns of strategy use. There was a tendency for readers with high transaction beliefs to process the text at a higher level and those with high transmission beliefs at a lower level. The differences, however, were more apparent in L1 than in L2. When reading in L2, although readers with distinctive belief types showed different strategy patterns, in general, they all tended to heavily rely on several local strategies.