In recent years, KSL (Korean as a second language) education has developed together with the rising status of Korea in the international community. In the context of KSL, the number of foreign students has increased dramatically by virtue of Korea??s growing status. Most learn the Korean language for academic purposes and successful reading is an important key to success in their academic setting. The purpose of this study is to examine the types of reading strategies employed by intermediate KSL learners when reading Korean texts. The study also attempted to examine similarities and differences in the use of reading strategies according to the variables of gender, nationality, text genre, and reading proficiency and to investigate the results of data analysis by multiple research methods, namely, reading strategies questionnaires/follow up interviews, think aloud protocols, and diary studies. The results of the study indicated that the participants employed all of the defined reading strategies. In particular, participants concentrated on dealing with cognitive strategies and support strategies. Furthermore, most participants employed ??focusing word?? strategy frequently owing to the effect of orthographic similarity. In addition, some participants used multiple reading strategies simultaneously rather than a particular single strategy to cope with a breakdown in comprehension. This study found no meaningful overall differences in strategy use according to the variables of gender, nationality, and text genre. However, skilful readers employed every reading strategy actively compared with less skilful readers with regard to the variable of proficiency. There were some discrepancies of results among multiple research methods. These differences are due to the characteristics of each research method. This finding suggested that in fact the multiple research methods serve to complement each other. Implications are discussed in relation to the significance of multiple research methods as well as the construction of KSL reading strategy training programs.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/257201 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Sim, Sang Min, School of Modern Language Studies, UNSW |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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