Abstract

The Chinese language has become an increasingly important Asian language for American students and more and more of them have a desire to learn it. The problems and the difficulties that Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners have when they try to use their knowledge of new vocabulary in reading comprehension are apparent. Previous studies have described some aspects that may influence reading comprehension and have indicated that Chinese is a relatively difficult language for native speakers of American English, but there are few studies that have focused on improving CFL learners' Chinese reading comprehension. This study investigates the effect of pre-learning vocabulary and contextualized word learning strategies on Chinese reading comprehension. The purpose of this study is to examine whether pre-learning vocabulary and contextualized word learning positively affect CFL learners' reading comprehension. The results show that pre-learning vocabulary does not have a positive effect on Chinese reading comprehension and that although contextualized word learning positively affects CFL learners' reading comprehension the effect is not significant. This study also gives relative analysis.

Degree

MA

College and Department

Humanities; Center for Language Studies

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2011-07-14

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd4681

Keywords

reading comprehension, Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners, word learning strategy, contextualized word learning, pre-learning, and word list learning

Language

English

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