Abstract
ABSTRACT Title: Effect of text type on high knowledge and low knowledge learners ' learning Author: Suna Bengü Odabaşı Thesis Chairperson: Dr. Theodore S. Rodgers, Bilkent University, MA TEFL Program Thesis Committee Members: Dr. Susan D. Bosher, Ms. Bena Gül Peker, Bilkent University, MA TEFL Program This experimental study was conducted in order to investigate whether an implicit text facilitates EFL learners' learning. In this study, two types of texts were used: explicit and implicit. An explicit text is a well-organized, coherent text. An implicit text is a less coherent text that does not spell everything out. These texts were taken from Britton and Gülgöz's (1991) study. The implicit text was a passage about bombing attacks on North Vietnam in 1965. The explicit text was improved according to the principles of Kintsch's representation model (Kitsch & van Dijk, 1978) which was developed to construct explicit texts from implicit texts. The participants were 84 Turkish EFL freshman students at the advanced level of proficiency from Middle East Technical University. Four classes from different departments were chosen for this study. A 2 x 2 factorial design was used in this study. The effect of background knowledge and text type on learning was tested by a multiple choice inference test and arelatedness rating scale. Two randomly chosen groups were treated as high knowledge subjects, while the others were low knowledge. The pertinent background knowledge was provided by a teaching text just before the reading phase of the experiment to the high knowledge groups and tested by a true/ false background knowledge test afterwards. Both implicit and explicit texts were distributed in each class in order to create four groups of subjects: high knowledge-implicit, high knowledge-explicit, low knowledge-implicit, and low knowledge-explicit groups. Contrary to my expectations, the results of two-way factorial analysis of variance showed that high knowledge learners learn better from an explicit text than from an implicit text and construct the most intended mental representation of the text. It was also expected that the low knowledge- explicit group would do better than the low knowledge- implicit group, as the greater explicitness of their text would have compensated for their lack of background knowledge. However, low knowledge-explicit and low knowledge -implicit groups had virtually the same scores although the standard deviations for the low knowledge- explicit group was higher, indicating greater variation in scores.The findings of this study suggest that explicit texts facilitate learning. The results suggest therefore that learning in an advanced EFL situation can be facilitated by explicit texts rather than implicit texts. Further research is needed in order to compare the effects of background knowledge and text types on randomly chosen EFL students with different text types.
