Graphic organizers and reading comprehension: Learners of Japanese as a second language

The present experiment was designed to examine effects of graphic organizers and chart-completion tasks on comprehension of history texts by learners of Japanese as a second language. It was expected that graphic organizers, functioning as an external representation, would help second-language readers store and integrate the ideas in the text. Participants, 40 intermediate-high level learners of Japanese (9 from China, 1 from Hong Kong, 4 from Taiwan, 26 from Korea; age range, 19 to 34 years, average age, 24.1 years) read text while following one of the following 3 procedures : reading with 2 charts (Chart Group), reading and inserting some suitable ideas into blanks (Completion-Task Group), and only reading (Control Group), and then were asked to recall the text they had read and to write it in their native language. The Chart Group recalled significantly more ideas at a middle level in textual hierarchy and more in the latter half of the text than did the Control Group. On the other hand, the Completion-Task Group recalled significantly fewer high-level ideas than did the Control Group. These results suggest that the graphic organizers helped the second-language learners select important ideas in the text and structure them, whereas surface-level performance of a completion tasks did not improve reading comprehension.