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

on gloss suggested that they still did not grow out <strong>of</strong> habits in senior high
instruction—intensive reading. From results <strong>of</strong> the background questionnaire, it is
found that despite learners’ rich experience in receiving extensive reading instructions,
very few <strong>of</strong> them have extensive reading habits. Without much practice, their
intensive reading habits were remarkably obvious while reading texts from the on-line
reading syllabus. Low tolerance <strong>of</strong> ambiguity was observed as learners tended to
look up every word that they were not completely sure. From the tracking records, it
is shown that learners seldom looked up target words in the bilingual concordancer,
Totalrecall, for more information besides Chinese translation. Instead, unglossed
words, including words from the familiar word lists, were the ones searched. It is
speculated that instead <strong>of</strong> using extensive reading strategies such as contextual
guessing, learners immediately sought for help whenever they stumbled across
sentences they did not understand. Furthermore, learners had the tendency to make
clear every single sentence before proceeding to read, a habit not encouraged in
extensive reading. This intensive reading habit in turn made reading long text more
tiresome.
Day and Bamford (1998) pointed out that learners’ previous experiences on
reading might predispose learners against extensive reading. Since intensive reading,
in which all vocabulary and grammatical patterns were carefully studied within texts,
was the common in-class practice in Taiwan, learners’ reading habits were difficult to
adjust even with extensive strategy instruction implemented. It is suggested that in
addition to making extensive reading strategies explicit in class, more practice
sessions should be scheduled as guidance to the extensive reading ability. Moreover,
on-going time to time reminders on goals and strategies <strong>of</strong> extensive reading could be
emphasized throughout the activity.
One other explanation for the contradiction on the presumably low new word
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