Effects of Graded Texts on EFL College Students' Incidental ...

3.3.4 Glossing <strong>of</strong> reading texts
Gloss is beneficial to incidental vocabulary learning and therefore incorporated
in our online extensive reading syllabus. Luckily, we were able to obtain Chinese
translation <strong>of</strong> texts from Sinorama, thus, development <strong>of</strong> gloss involved first matching
and aligning sentences from two databases: the Chinese translation, and the original
English texts. After translation was aligned with English, manual double checking
was employed to make sure the correctness <strong>of</strong> each translation. After this,
JavaScript was used for displaying our gloss. Within the reading text, we provided
gloss for target words and proper nouns. The meaning <strong>of</strong> the target words and
proper nouns could be retrieved by a click on the word. The gloss containing the
appropriate Chinese translation in context would pop up in a separate box right by the
clicked word. An illustration <strong>of</strong> the gloss is displayed in Appendix I
.
3.3.5 Reading text interfaces
After sixteen texts were chosen according to our sequencing procedure, we then
constructed a website for extensive reading on-line. For the purpose <strong>of</strong> directing
readers’ main attention to reading for comprehension, three comprehension questions
were devised at the end <strong>of</strong> every text (see Appendix K). Learners were able to do
these questions on line and were provided with immediate feedback on the correctness
<strong>of</strong> the answers. Also, for the purpose <strong>of</strong> providing searching opportunity, the access
<strong>of</strong> an on-line search tool, TotalRecall, which is a bilingual concordancer (Wu, et al.,
2003), was provided for learners who may wish to further investigate into target word
use (see Appendix I and Appendix J). The on-line extensive reading website first
required learners to log on with their passwords, gave an orientation on available tools
and the meaning <strong>of</strong> highlighting, and provided the reading sequence list (see
Appendix G and Appendix H). Each reading text had the main text with target
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