The Effects of Syntactic Enhancement on EFL Reading Fluency for Secondary School Students

Improving reading fluency in English is a challenging task for English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students. It is particularly hard for those whose first languages are linguistically distant from English, for example, Korea, Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian languages. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether digitally reformatted text scaffolds the development of English reading fluency in an EFL context. Visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) technology was used to reformat block-formatted English text into one with sentence structures highlighted. A total of 63 eighth graders (middle school students in Korea) read reformatted texts, while the control (n = 32) read their block-formatted textbook for 15 weeks. The analysis results of pre- and posttests indicated that reformatted texts could scaffold EFL students who learned to improve English reading fluency. However, reformatted texts did not positively affect reading speed, presumably because of different levels of vocabulary used in pre and posttests. We also found evidence that VSTF reformation can be used as syntactic enhancement which makes it easier for EFL students to take in English syntactic information as input. All in all, our findings suggest an effective instructional practice for EFL teachers with a focus on reading fluency.