The present study examines L2 reading proficiency effects on the relative contribution of vocabulary knowledge and grammar knowledge to L2 reading comprehension for Korean high school EFL learners. To this end, 200 high school students were asked to take a vocabulary knowledge test, a grammar test, and a reading comprehension test. The participants were divided into three sub-groups by L2 reading ability in order to examine L2 proficiency effects. Multiple regression analyses for the sub-groups indicated the relationships among the three variables as distinctive. The results showed that syntactic knowledge had a predictive power for reading performance in the high reading group, but vocabulary had the same quality in the intermediate reading group. For the low reading group, neither vocabulary nor grammar could significantly account for the L2 reading variance. Theoretical implications and directions for further studies are discussed.

A study was conducted to investigate the levels of representation in memory constructed as an outcome of L2 reading comprehension, and the effects of L2 proficiency, prior knowledge, and L1 reading skills on the construction of the representation. A total number of 128 Korean EFL learners participated in the study. Their L2 reading comprehension was tested through verification measure and comprehension questions designed to assess different levels of understanding including the sentence-level, textbase understanding and the situation model, or the deeper level of understanding of what the text is about. Results showed that the representation the L2 readers constructed was characterized as consisting of rather loose textbase understanding and relatively weak, but varying degrees of, situational understanding. Only L2 proficiency, among the three factors, appeared to have a significant effect on the levels of understanding in the representation the L2 readers constructed.

The study investigated whether Korean EFL students' vocabulary used in reading-based writing differed according to writing topic and their reading and writing proficiency. College students enrolled in writing courses (n=95) were asked to write argumentative essays in response to two readings on judging people by appearance (JPA) and disclosing personal information of serious criminals (DPI). These students were divided into high and low proficiency writer groups and into high and low proficiency reader groups according to their writing and reading scores respectively. The students' vocabulary used in writing was then analyzed by VocabProfile, which provided four lexical frequency lists: the first 1000 frequent words (K1) including function words (FW) and content words (CW), the second 1000 frequent words (K2), academic word list (AWL), and off the list words (OLW). The results indicated that the topic JPA produced a higher proportion of K1 and content words, whereas DPI generated more K2 and off the list words. None of the vocabulary profiles, however, significantly differed according to the students’ reading proficiency. In contrast, proficient writers were found to use significantly more K1 and function words than their counterparts. With the topic effect further considered, for JPA, proficient writers used more K1 words and function words whereas less proficient writers used more K2 and off the list words. With regard to DPl, proficient writers were found to use more function words than low proficient writers. Findings are discussed in more detail, along with implications.

The purpose of this experimental study is threefold. First is to investigate how significantly EFL learner’s competence in the English pronoun as cohesive tie correlates with their reading proficiency. Second is to search for pedagogical implications for acquisition of the pronouns with reference to awareness-raising instruction. Third is to examine how narration variation affects EFL learners’ co-interpretative competence in the pronouns created in descriptive or direct speech narration. The subjects were grouped into two by pedagogical variable, i.e. awareness- raising instruction. Both control and experimental groups were given three tests: 1) house-made Toefl as pretest or norm test, and two post-tests: 2) Pronoun Test in which every pronoun was asked to be co-interpreted with its referents in the reading text; 3) Reading Proficiency Test constructed by a close technique. All the test scores were statistically processed in terms of t-test and the Pearson correlation. The statistics revealed a positively significant correlation (0.743 or 0.629) between EFL learners’ co-interpretive competence in the English pronoun and their reading proficiency. Furthermore, the impact of awareness- raising instruction turned out to be significant for co-interpretive competence and thus for reading proficiency. This experimental study concludes that higher competence in the pronoun corresponds to higher proficiency in reading. Thus acquisition of English pronouns must be facilitated at the discourse level by means of intra, inter, and intra-intersentential co-interpretation with their referents.

This paper illustrates a strong bond between the genre constitutions of reading textbooks and the improvement of EFL learners` reading proficiency arising therefrom. Textbooks should be as simple as possible within the proficiency level of EFL learners. The advisability of simplified and authentic texts is recommended for their reading texts. Authentic simple texts should be devised or located in the real world. Peering into whether reading texts contain simple, suitable, exploitable, and readable contents, which should be a desideratum on an authentic textbook, this paper argues that only when reading texts are properly constituted to encompass EFL learners` interest in English, a genuine learner-minded activity in which students focus on the class can be implemented. In a bid to nail the key elements of the reading textbooks, this paper analyzes their components and contexts based on several genre categories. Along with the belief that reading texts should contain the genres to advocate considerable attention to EFL learners with intermediate-level reading proficiency and to encourages them to move on to a higher-level proficiency, this paper claims that the genres of reading textbooks should not swing too far one way, but the constitutions should be kept in equilibrium.