ElGhazoly, B. (2018). The L2 Linguistic Threshold and Reading Comprehension: Syntactic Parsing and the Extraction of Meaning from Newspaper Headlines in English L2. CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education, 65(1), 593-624. doi: 10.21608/opde.2018.396237
Boshra ElGhazoly. "The L2 Linguistic Threshold and Reading Comprehension: Syntactic Parsing and the Extraction of Meaning from Newspaper Headlines in English L2". CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education, 65, 1, 2018, 593-624. doi: 10.21608/opde.2018.396237
ElGhazoly, B. (2018). 'The L2 Linguistic Threshold and Reading Comprehension: Syntactic Parsing and the Extraction of Meaning from Newspaper Headlines in English L2', CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education, 65(1), pp. 593-624. doi: 10.21608/opde.2018.396237
ElGhazoly, B. The L2 Linguistic Threshold and Reading Comprehension: Syntactic Parsing and the Extraction of Meaning from Newspaper Headlines in English L2. CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education, 2018; 65(1): 593-624. doi: 10.21608/opde.2018.396237
The L2 Linguistic Threshold and Reading Comprehension: Syntactic Parsing and the Extraction of Meaning from Newspaper Headlines in English L2
Meaning extraction on the basis of available lexical and grammatical information, i.e., syntactic parsing, is gaining attention as a crucial element in reading comprehension in L1 and L2 settings (Grabe & Stoller, 2013). However, the role that syntactic knowledge plays in the “L2 threshold” required for fluent reading comprehension has yet to be fully defined (Laufer & Kalovski, 2010). Exhibiting a telegram-like syntax, English newspaper headlines represent a reading comprehension challenge for English L2ers because of the presence of non-canonical structures and grammatical violations that include ellipsis of grammatical categories. This study explores the role of syntactic knowledge in interpreting/comprehending newspaper headlines (of different syntactic types and difficulty). Participants of this study (N=48) are Arabic-English L2ers classified into three groups of readers; a proficient reader group (N=14), an intermediate reader group (N=20) and a poor reader group (N=14). The study employs four tasks: A speed reading task (Ten (400 word) reading comprehension passages) (Millett, 2013) (used with permission); a cloze test (Brown, 1980) (used with permission); a 30-minute essay writing task; and a newspaper headline interpretation task. The findings point to: (1) a significant positive relationship between learners’ reading comprehension abilities and syntactic knowledge; and (2) a joint role played by syntactic parsing and lexical knowledge in enabling accurate interpretation of headlines. Here, sufficient lexical knowledge was not enough to guarantee adequate comprehension of a headline. The concept of a vocabulary or a syntactic threshold was disconfirmed.
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