TEXT PROCESSING BEHAVIOUR AMONG KOGI STATE UNIVERSITY UNDERGRAUDUATE STUDENTS

TEXT PROCESSING BEHAVIOUR AMONG KOGI STATE UNIVERSITY UNDERGRAUDUATE STUDENTS

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

            The English language is a medium of international communication which mediates a whole range of cultural and cross-cultural concepts. The international dimension of the use of the language is not only becoming difficult to ignore but offers the language teaching a potentially more significant role than traditional ethnocentric views of the language as a peculiarly Anglo- Saxon entity (Prodromou, 1992:38).

Having occupied a pride of place in the Nigerian school curriculum for so long,  the English language has evidently come to stay.  It will continue to bestride the Nigerian educational landscape for the foreseeable future as there is no immediate alternative.

As the language of science and technology and as a passport to educational advancement and prestigious employment, as the language of commerce, trade and administration, it is important that English, with its attendant skills, especially, reading skill, should be taught and learnt well in our schools. Reading is one of the language skills which, if successfully acquired, gives the learner a new power of communication, the power to extract information from the printed page. Unfortunately, this skill is usually neglected in the teaching and learning of English in a second language situation. In fact, Onuigbo (1995) rightly maintains that:

This neglect apparently stems from the erroneous assumption that the skills the learner already has as a ‘hearer’ and ‘speaker’ of the language automatically endow him with the ability to read the language,

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            Good reading habits should be inculcated into our children through effective teaching of reading comprehension by the English language reading teachers. The basic problem for English learners however, is how to master  reading comprehension in order to develop good reading habits. This problem is a matter of concern to the English language teachers. The reason for this is that the prestige of English, success in the language, that is the ability to have a mastery of the language skills, especially reading and writing skills, is seen as a wonderful key to decent employment, admission to post – primary institutions, including the universities.

The indispensability of reading skill can never be over stressed. This is probably why Onukaogu (2001) declares that:

Reading is indispensable to a people in the promotion of their culture and civilization. Since our forefathers did not have a reading culture, we today cannot fully comprehend the hallmark of their civilization.

In order to avoid the mistakes of our forefathers therefore, we must endeavour to promote reading and writing amongst our students. We need to record our civilization in writing so that posterity can read and benefit from it.

One of the most fundamental aspects of comprehension according to Paynter, Bodrovaand Doty (2005), is the ability to deal with unfamiliar words encountered in a text.  Readers who struggle with word-level tasks use up valuable cognitive space that could be allotted to deeper levels of text analysis. It is not enough to rely solely on context clues to predict the meaning of new words, since this strategy often results in erroneous or superficial understanding of key terms, especially in content reading area.

Reading comprehension is significantly influenced by a student’s level of word-knowledge, which includes vocabulary and spelling skills, as well as the ability to decode words in the structure and meaning of words at various levels of complexity (Watt-Taffe, 2006)

Teachers can facilitate the growth of word-knowledge through the explicit teaching of word-patterns and word-solving strategies within the context of a word-rich classroom.  The goal of instruction in reading, spelling and vocabulary is to help students develop “word-consciousness” and to become independent word-solvers in all subject areas.

Early studies in reading were focused on perception. Javal (1839), shows that the eyes move across the printed page in jumps which he called saccades – rapid, ballistic – like movements that last for about twenty milliseconds and bring the print into the visual area of greatest discriminating power, that is, the fovea centralist. These saccades are followed by pauses called fixations of approximately 240 milliseconds in duration. Cattel (2001), stated that adult readers could perceive a whole word faster than its individual letters while Huey (2002) shows that as readers mature, they move to longer units of perception. He points out that the number and duration of fixations and regressions decrease with maturity and are affected by changes in the content and difficulty level of the text as well as the reader’s purpose in reading.

These perceptual studies have been characterized as a theoretical and essentially word-centred. Hewitt(2001). regarded reading as the identification of words in sequence or the recoding of letters to sounds. At that time of the early studies in reading that were focused on perception, research techniques concentrated on the time taken to read lists of often unrelated words and nonsense diagrams. It is perhaps reasonable to assume that research in reading began with perception as it has done with phonology in linguistics because these areas represent “the most visible part” of language (Hewitt, 2001)

However, in the field of reading, many of these studies contributed to the knowledge about reading, reading speed and the effect of the nature of text or the reader’s purpose upon these. Some contributions were made for the understanding of how comprehension operates. Research attention therefore became focused on area within comprehension.

A shift in the analysis of reading from perception to cognition occurred when Thorndyke (1983) defined reading as reasoning and compared comprehension to solving a problem in Mathematics. Research orientation during this period tended towards the identification of specific factors or skills which were presumed to comprise reading. Research techniques involved the development of a battery of comprehension tests consisting of short passages or unconnected single paragraph to test proficiency in component skill areas such as vocabulary, word recognition, structural analysis and literal comprehension and interpretation.

Gates (2005:83) formulated the hypothesis that general reading ability consists of a multiplicity of factors, and that success or failure in reading depends on whether a reader’s strength in these factors outweighs his weakness. Holmes (2000) through the formulation of a reading theory called the substrata factor theory, and the application of statistical techniques stated that there is a multiplicity of reading skills organized into working systems according to the reader’s purpose and the demands of the reading task. A reading scientist, Davis (1994) produced a list of skills which he considered important in reading comprehension, devised items to test the skills and constructed a comprehension test. The results of the test were factors analyzed to produce statistically significant components out of which he concluded that comprehension among readers is not a unitary ability, but is largely dependent on knowledge of word meanings and ability to reason in verbal terms. However, these results were contradicted by latter studies conducted by  Lunzer (1984:64) who  stated that

Individual differences in reading comprehension should not be thought of in terms of a multiplicity of specialized aptitudes. To all intents and purposes such differences reflected one general aptitude. This being the pupil’s ability and willingness to reflect on whatever it is he is reading.

Thus, research in the sub-skill tradition, termed, psychometric research by Hewitt, proved inconclusive and debatable. The only result consistently agreed upon is the single factor most highly correlated with reading comprehension scores. This notwithstanding, this and other findings constituted important insights to the study of reading comprehension.

A more productive line of research began with studies from the psycholinguistic point of view.  This point of view took account of the processing needs of the participants and the demands of the context.  In discussing the contribution of psycholinguistics to the field of reading comprehension, Ruddell (1987: 61) asserts that

The role of psycholinguistics in studying language skills is undoubtedly more powerful than either that of linguistics or psychology considered separately.  Although the linguist has offered a description of language competence through possible systems for describing and generating sentences, and the psychologist has pursued learning theory from various view points, the psycholinguist is interested in exploring the psychological reality of linguistic descriptions. In brief, the view point of the psycholinguist is described by Miller (2003) as that of “accepting a more realistic conception of what language is”. A major goal of the psycholinguist is the development of a theory or theories of performance.

As succinctly stated above, the contribution of psycholinguistics is inestimable. This psycholinguistic viewpoint on reading comprehension, then, builds upon the linguistics foundation and goes beyond it.  While linguists claim interest in only theories of competence, psycholinguists are interested in theories of both competence and performance.  Goodman (1998) has pointed out that underlying all performance is a basic competence which must be built up and expanded if performance changes are to be durable and meaningful.  Another way in which psycholinguistic models of reading comprehension have built upon linguistic ones is that, whereas the linguistic models have tended to be word-centred and sound-centred, psycholinguistic models have used these decoding processes as starting points for a meaning-centred, information-and communication-processing approach to the understanding of reading comprehension.

Goodman (1978) postulated an explicit model of reading comprehension composed of three simultaneous systems.  The three decoding systems in his model are the grapho-phonic, the syntactic and the semantic systems. While the grapho-phonic system refers to the perception of printed clues such as letters, words, punctuation marks and spelling-sound patterns, the syntactic system makes use of knowledge of sentence patterns, function words that signal meaning bearing elements and other pattern markers such as suffixes that give information or redundantly confirm the use of a word.  The semantic system, on the other hand, consists of concepts, information and other experiences elicited by the message.

According to Goodman (1978), in effect, words exist only within the flow of language; neither words nor morphemes can be defined or pronounced outside of this language stream of varying intonation, pitch, stress and gesture.  Using the research technique of misuse analysis where children read sections of texts aloud and the investigator noted the location and type of errors or “misuse”, Goodman (1998) stated that primary school children who were unable to decode words in isolation, were able to read the same words successfully in context.  Syntactic context, is essential in language learning and reading comprehension.   Goodman’s major argument is that knowledge of the structural system of sound and grammar of the language sets up expectations that strongly influence perception. Thus, Goodman views the reading process as a “psycholinguistic guessing game” in which thought and language interact to bring about reading comprehension which he defined as reconstruction of the writer’s intended message.

According to Goodman’s model, the reader fixes at a point, and begins a selection process; picking up graphic cues based on prior choices, language knowledge, cognitive styles and learned strategies.  From what is seen and expected, the reader next forms a perceptual image, searching memory for matching syntactic and phonological cues.  The reader ultimately makes a guess or tentative choice and stores the constructed meaning in short term memory.

Ruddell (1994) presented an activity-oriented psycholinguistic model that sees reading as a cognitive language processing task. Synthesizing the results of linguistic and psycholinguistic research, he constructed a comprehensive model that encompasses, as variables in a system of communication model, grapheme-phoneme correspondence, short and long-term memory, linguistic and non-linguistic meanings, transformational and rewrite rules, feedback mechanisms, affective mobilizers and cognitive strategies.  According to Ruddell’s model (1994: 61), reading is

A complex psycholinguistic behaviour which consists of decoding written language units, processing the resulting language counterparts through structural and semantic dimensions, and interpreting the deep structure data relative to an individual’s established objectives.

These psycholinguistic models and others (Smith, 1975) combined to give a satisfactory explanation of observed reading comprehension behaviour and represent some progress in reading comprehension research.  These models highlighted the characteristics of the reading comprehension process as:

1. The immediacy, fluency or automaticity of the skilled reader’s responses.
2. The occasional slower or mediated response as component skills.
3. Simultaneous operation of multi-systems-the visual, phonological, syntactical, semantic and affective.
4. A wide range of inference behaviour – expectation, anticipation, prediction, hypothesis formation, confirmation and rejection.
5. The reader’s background experience.

Although later models were more successful in introducing mechanisms to account adequately for these features, it must be stressed that many of the principles of these models were never superseded but merely subsumed in the later theories.

It is to be noted at this juncture that another feature that distinguished linguistic and psycholinguistic models was their preference for a particular direction of information processing. The terms “bottom-up” and “Top-down” were used to denote differences in the direction of processing information.  Bottom-up or data-driven processing begins at the level of word-recognition with the visual and perceptual processes that operated to retrieve verbal memories in response to the words on page. Meanings thus derived are made available to higher level processes to bring about an understanding of larger units like the sentence or entire discourse.  The models by Gough (1995) and Gibson (1972) mentioned above are examples of the bottom-up approach to reading comprehension studies. Top-down or conceptually-driven processing, on the other hand, is the development of pattern recognition through the use of contextual information. It is a higher level inferential processes that readers bring to bear on their reading. For instance, you are presented with a paragraph written with difficult handwriting, it is easier to understand what the writer wants to covey if you read the whole paragraph rather than reading the words in separate terms, the brain maybe able to perceive and understand the gist of the paragraph due to the context supplied by the surrounding words.

In the light of the foregoing reviews, the investigator considers the following a useful working definition of the term, reading comprehension or text processing.

Reading comprehension is a multi-dimensional interactive process with many sub-processes operating simultaneously to create a mental model of situations, real or imaginary, in response to structural signals of text interacting with linguistic-cultural factors of the reader’s background and psycho-social aspect of the environment or context (Templeton, 2004).

A theory such as the scenario concept is useful because it takes account of those aspects of text, reader and context which interact to produce understanding.  “Text processing and reading comprehension procedure” has been chosen in order to adequately focus attention on the fact that reading is a multi-dimensional interactive process whose outcome is always comprehension. This means the interactions of the reading teacher, the reader and the text as well as the affective domain of the reader.

1.2       Statement of the Problem

This study investigates reading comprehension processes using a sample of Kogi State University undergraduate students who speak English as a second language. Up until now, comparatively little research has focused on those for whom English is a second language. Testifying to the limited research in this area, Kreidler (1989) opines that

There is a vast literature dealing with teaching of reading to the native speakers of English. In contrast, the teaching of reading to students for whom English is a new (or second) language is a badly neglected area of research and discussion.

One of the difficulties in the way of such research was that, in terms of teaching and testing, much of the materials for use with non-native students was borrowed from materials designed for native language reading instruction and was not even adapted to the needs of the non-native speakers. This deficiency was particularly marked in the area of standardized instruments of measurement and tended to call into question some of the results obtained. This has been the case with a number of early studies conducted among Nigerian university students.

Another problem in the way of reading comprehension research with users of English as a second language is in the selection of the theory that is suitable and applicable to text processing and reading comprehension. The earliest studies on reading in Nigeria, for example, could be characterized as theoretical in keeping with the general state of knowledge in reading at that time. At that time, the research techniques approach as seen in repeated attempts to rank reading difficulties of Nigerian University undergraduate students.

Therefore, there is a need for more research in the area of text processing and reading comprehension behavior among bilingual Nigerian University Students. This is because the teaching of reading comprehension to students for whom English is a second language is a badly neglected area of research. This informs my use of scenario approach that has not been used in a second language situation to bridge the gap that has not been filled in text processing behavior among Kogi State University undergraduate Students.

1.3       Purpose of the Study

            The purpose of this study is to investigate the mental processes that are involved in literary text processing and reading comprehension procedure, especially the cognitive strategies employed in different reading situations. The study is also designed to identify structural and cultural features of texts that have significant impact on reading comprehension behaviour among a sample of Nigerian University Undergraduate Students.

A study such as this is needed because it represents a significant contribution to learning to describe the text processing behavior and reading comprehension capacity of a typical sample of Nigeria undergraduate students as well as the textual, contextual and cultural factors that impede or facilitate the operation of these processes.        In a wider context, this study is needed to systematize and explain a body of facts on reading comprehension behaviour in order to complement the work of descriptive linguists and close the gaps in our knowledge of the total functioning of language.

1.4 The Significance of the Study

The study is expected to provide useful information to teachers about the variables which may assist in predicting or assessing students’ reading comprehension performance. It provides Information on how language background and environmental factors interact to make an impact on students’ reading comprehension performance.

Furthermore, it is hoped that the results of the study will serve authors, publishers and textbook selectors at all levels of education in Nigeria as a guide to textual features and cultural factors that can impede or facilitate comprehension of written and printed message. In all, the study will help in making recommendations for more efficient teaching and learning of reading comprehension in English especially for students in a second language situation.

1.5       Scope of the Study

            It is necessary that up-to-date research, employing the insights of current theories on reading comprehension, be carried out for a variety of groups of Nigerians. In selecting Kogi State University undergraduate students as a target population, this researcher recognizes  the fact that there is hardly a group of people for whom skill in comprehension is more vital than it is for students engaged in the study and comprehension of the material that will form the basis of their professional careers. This research work is predicated upon the little or no attention given to text processing behavior among Nigerian bilingual students. The work is therefore, meant to focus more attention on the text processing activities of Kogi State University undergraduate students in order to provide valuable information on reading comprehension processes and operation that will influence many aspects of English language teaching and learning, and some aspects of educational practice not only at University, but also at the secondary and primary levels of education in Nigeria.

 

1.6 Research Questions

This study investigated the reading comprehension performance of Kogi State University undergraduate students. The central focus of the study was on examination of cognitive strategies and an identification of the structural and cultural features of texts that may have a significant impact on reading comprehension performance. In short, the study sought to answer the following research questions:

1. To what extent does Kogi State University undergraduate students in the sample reflect processing at the following levels:

1. Literal
2. Inferential

• Assimilative?

1.  What is the relationship between reading comprehension performance and any or all of the following structural features of text:

1. Text genre
2. Paragraph structure
3. Linguistic structure
4. Cohesive structure
5. Conceptual structure?

1. What is the relationship between reading comprehension performance and the following cultural features of text:

1. Cultural relevance
2. Reader’s choice of a point of view?

1. What is the relationship between reading comprehension performance and the cognitive strategies employed  in processing

1. Explicit information?
2. Implicit information?

 

TEXT PROCESSING BEHAVIOUR AMONG KOGI STATE UNIVERSITY UNDERGRAUDUATE STUDENTS

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