Pragmatic Meaning and EFL Learners’ Text-understanding Ability

Sorayya Behroozizad,Hossein Bakhtiyarzadeh

doi:10.5539/ells.v2n1p28

Abstract

Reading comprehension occupies a very vital position as one of the skills in learning English as a foreign language. The ability to comprehend any reading text requires interpreting text through making accurate connection between the linguistic representations or meaning of words and sentences and their pragmatic outcomes. Thus, one of the challenging burdens of EFL learners is to capture the intended meaning of any reading text. This paper aims at introducing the significance of pragmatic meaning in reading L2 texts as an alternative to foster EFL learners’ text-understanding ability. In this regard, the researchers employed 4o students in the field of ELT to read two kinds of texts; namely semantically-oriented and pragmatically-oriented texts and answer the related questions. Findings of the study indicated that the majority of students were capable of answering the questions in simplified texts due to their familiarity with the passage when processing the reading material and the ease of the passage. However, only a small number of students was successful in answering the questions of original passages. Based on the results of the study, some guidelines are suggested to make students familiar with pragmatic meaning. In addition, this research enables the students (particularly less- gifted ones) to attend to pragmatic meaning in text-understanding, which in fact helps them to overcome the problem of text- understanding to a considerable extent.

Highlights

The causes of failure of foreign language learners in reading L2 texts with comprehension has been investigated continuously by different experts and this problem has created some mis- understanding among theorists
It was decided that the best instrument or material to adopt for this investigation was reading texts
The overall result clearly tends to support the hypothesis that students are not so familiar with pragmatic meaning of sentences and this is an important reason for failure of students to understand the text

Summary

Introduction

The causes of failure of foreign language learners in reading L2 texts with comprehension has been investigated continuously by different experts and this problem has created some mis- understanding among theorists. Various viewpoints about the factors causing in comprehending reading passages have been presented Some theorists such as Alderson (1984) believes that one of the justifications for L2 readers’ failure is employing incoorect and inapproperiate strategies in reading that text in that language. Bowen indicates that one of the student’s failures in reading comprehension is looking up the meaning of every word in the passage in a dictionary and losing the general meaning and central idea of the passage during reading These students who are considered poor readers cannot understand the passage except for the limited number of words which donot play any crucial role in text or passage comprehension

Objectives

Methods

Results