Design of a Web-Based Sentence Analysis System to Support EFL Reading Instruction

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of an on-line Cumulative Sentence Analysis (CSA) instruction on university engineering students' English reading comprehension. Within the framework of CSA instruction, the reading comprehension process can be divided into six steps: identifying finite verbs, finding key words, separating clauses, identifying subjects and main verbs, adding words stepwise, and translating the sentence. The results showed that the experimental group achieved a higher level of reading comprehension performance following the instruction. Inter-group comparison also revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in the post-test, while no difference was found between these groups in the pretest. The findings clearly demonstrated that on-line CSA instruction is an efficient and feasible approach to helping engineering students cope with their problems of reading English texts.