Reading Comprehension Component Skills of Chinese-Speaking ESL and EFL Learners

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China. The findings suggested that the contributions of these three reading component skills differed in ESL and EFL contexts: In the ESL context, both second language (L2) lexical inferencing and L2 decoding were significant predictors of L2 reading comprehension, but L2 listening comprehension did not correlate with L2 reading comprehension. In the EFL context, L2 lexical inferencing was the only significant predictor of L2 reading comprehension. Thus, it appears that the Simple View Reading (decoding + listening comprehension = reading comprehension) is not applicable to Chinese-speaking adult learners of L2 English because learners in both ESL and EFL contexts rely on word-level reading subskills.