CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background and Motivation
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立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
The introduction consists of four parts: (1) background and motivation; (2) the purpose of the study; (3) the significance of the study, and (4) the organization of the thesis.
1.1 Background and Motivation
Undoubtedly, students have a lot of differences. Town (2003) noted that physical differences such as height, facial characteristics and tone of voice, are the most obvious ones. It is also observable in the class that some students around us are good at memorizing something, while others think of memorizing as boring, good at analyzing or thinking inherently, instead. Some are specialized in arts, literature, history and language learning, while others are interested in science, physics, chemistry, engineering, and the like. Some pay close attention to the lectures teachers give, take note of what their teacher says and everything on the blackboard, while others may be absent-minded or day-dreaming even though they are in class. Some may be more concentrated but slow-witted, while others speak more actively in response to teacher’s questions. Some may look “indifferent, cold, and distant”
(Richard & Stephen, 1998, p.2), while others are friendly, sensitive and sociable.
Understanding all these differences can be a prerequisite for recognizing the existence of individual learner differences among students, which may directly or indirectly influence their learning outcomes since learners will bring several
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國立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
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individual characteristics to their learning process. The better researchers understand learner’s differences, the more constructive and facilitative instructions researchers can provide. That is the reason why the present study attempts to concentrate on the individual differences, in learning styles in the educational context (Brown, 2000) to probe into their relations to language learning and teaching.
Reading comprehension has always been of great concern in the academic community. Tsao (1992) observed two great shortcomings of reading instructions in Taiwan. The first one is the incapability of fostering, developing and cultivating students’ autonomous or independent reading habits. The second one is that students pay so close attention to the words in detail, or overanalyze the sentence structures, as to miss the “main ideas” or the “central thoughts” of the text. That is, they only read word for word and phrase by phrase without reading lexical chunks. They cannot make an educated guess for the real meanings by using the context and their background knowledge. These dilemmas they encountered come as a result of our traditional examination-oriented learning environments, i.e., learning not for information and pleasure, but exams.
Too caring about the scores deprives them of the pleasure of reading and they are naturally and inevitably being directed to the details. That is, they read bits and pieces, word for word, and sentence by sentence. They cannot help striving to keep everything in mind, and definitely, the time for reading comprehension and getting the “whole” picture of the article is occupied. They just see “the trees,” but lose
“the entire fascinating and marvelous forest.” They unconsciously adopt the so-called “riot learning,” instead of “meaningful learning” (Anderson & Ausubel 1965, cited by Brown, 2000). It is natural and habitual for them to be led to read the text in an analytic way. This is one kind of the characteristics of the FI learner’s
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國立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
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learning style, tending to be attentive to details, and processing information in parts (Riding & Rayner, 1998). In a sense, while reading they are too clear-cut and too demanding learners without any ambiguity tolerance (Brown, 2000). They can’t stand up with any vague, uncertain, ambiguous contexts, situations or surroundings as long as they come across some unfamiliar words or complex structures.
Apart from the above unfavorable learning phenomenon, another trend should be noticed that the reading workload for test-takers has recently been increased (see Appendix A). According to a statistics on the word numbers in the reading comprehension tests from 1996 to 2011 (words in question items included), the average word numbers of the reading passages are increasing. The average word number of the reading passage was 377 from 1996 and 2001; 420 words from 2002 and 2006, and close to 450 words from 2007 and 2011. Apparently, the requirement of the reading test is getting more and more demanding. Students should not only increase their reading speed but enhance their skills in reading comprehension.
Simply put, reading is no longer an exciting, thrilling, inviting and intoxicating adventure of “a psychological guessing game” (Goodman, 1967, p.497). It is more like crawling into the swamp for those learners who are accustomed to reading word for word and sentence by sentence. This experience turns out to be a kind of slow, slimy, unpleasant, strenuous, painstaking, and grueling ordeal (Tsao, 1992). However, if FI and FD learners are given particular treatment as done in this thesis, FI learners could understand FD learners’ learning advantages that could be complementary to FI learners’ disadvantages, and vice versa. Just take FI for instance, after the treatment, they are able to learn to perceive or interpret information as a whole. They will no longer pay too much attention to details. They can avoid being caught on the spot. They will get the literal meanings, and simultaneously read between the lines.
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國立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
They can get the implying meaning, read beyond the surface of the text, and further appreciate more valuable information the text conveyed.