New Words and New Worlds: Examination of Literature-Based Instruction in University EFL Classrooms

This study was originally intended to describe reading behavior among undergraduate social science students at a university in Taiwan, as revealed through concurrent introspection, and to compare it with that of their counterparts in Hong Kong as reported in Hull (2000). However, during pilot-testing in Taiwan of the text used in the Hong Kong study (a short academic article), it became obvious that a much shorter and linguistically simpler text would have to be substituted to yield data rich enough for a viable analysis (a magazine article was chosen). Thus, since a direct comparison between the two contexts was no longer possible, the findings in the current study are descriptive. The data revealed a wide range of reading strategies reported among the Taiwanese university students. Their reports tended to focus on meaning and personal reactions to the text rather than on language; there was also evidence of considerable individual variation. The concluding discussion includes a focus on factors, such as degree of exposure to English, which might have led to the apparently large gap in the L2 reading proficiency levels of university students in these two Chinese-speaking East Asian contexts.