Effects of text structure instruction on Japanese EFL students

An instructional approach to replace the traditional Yakudoku method is required for the instruction of text comprehension. The traditional Yakudoku method focuses on the translation of English into Japanese in a single sentence, which disturbs the flow of text comprehension and results in a loss of meaning. One way to resolve this may direct students’ attention to the whole text through the learning of text structure. While the effect of text structure instruction has been exhibited in the L1 context, little empirical research has examined the effectiveness of the teaching of text structure for the Japanese students. The present study investigated the effects of the teaching of text structure. A mixed methods design was employed with an emphasis on a quantitative approach. Instruction was given to college students over a total of seven lessons. Reading comprehension tests, recall tests, and questionnaires were used as data collection methods, complemented by interviews. The results showed that the intervention could strongly improve the participants’ reading comprehension. Especially, the lower group benefited greatly from the intervention. Recall data collected from all the participants did not indicate a significant increase in the comparison organisation although the extracted participants significantly increased the amount of information. No significant increase was produced in the problem/solution organisation while the lower experimental participants produced a light increase. The intervention modestly altered students’ identification of the two types of the comparison and problem/solution organisation, especially for the lower experimental participants. The results also indicated that at the onset, more than half of the participants lacked the knowledge of text structure. Through the intervention, the number of experimental participants who could identify the rhetorical organisation rose. These results suggest that the teaching of text structure is effective for students with low reading ability to read expository text.