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

direct phonetic translations <strong>of</strong> Taiwanese names on objects, idioms, or customs were
used in Sinorama texts, for example, shabing youtiao (燒餅油條) or jitong (乩童).
Such words were common but not easy to detect and isolate in Sinorama articles.
They have amounted to a percentage in the texts which attenuated the effect <strong>of</strong> word
lists frequency and sequencing <strong>of</strong> text if not excluded one by one. Constant
obstacles therefore emerged during the process <strong>of</strong> locating high frequent words,
calculating the percentage <strong>of</strong> unfamiliar words, highlighting <strong>of</strong> target words and
exposed words, and glossing for unknown words. During the process <strong>of</strong>
programming, time consuming manual modification and screening were required in
order to tackle such problems. Though texts in Sinorama do <strong>of</strong>fer the advantage <strong>of</strong>
being background-familiar, a corpus not as strongly culture-oriented as Sinorama
texts is suggested to be utilized in the future for an online extensive reading syllabus
in order to simplify sequencing procedures.
A second technical difficulty originated during the process <strong>of</strong> glossing. In order
to locate appropriate meaning for target words and proper nouns, development <strong>of</strong>
gloss involved first matching and aligning sentences from Chinese and English texts.
After Chinese translation was aligned with English, manual double checking was then
employed to make sure the correctness <strong>of</strong> each translation. However, the subtle
meaning differences in English-Chinese sentences were unable to guarantee the
correctness <strong>of</strong> single word translation. As a result, unexpectedly more manual
modification was invested. It is supposed that a more plausible method able to
generate gloss would remarkably reduce the difficulty <strong>of</strong> incorporating gloss to the
online extensive reading syllabus.
To sum up, technically, the feasibility <strong>of</strong> incorporating on-line searching tools,
gloss, word lists, and computerized sequencing techniques to an on-line extensive
reading syllabus for vocabulary learning purpose could be more successfully realized
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