A Pilot Study of Explicit Reading – Representation of Implicit Chunking in the Readers’ Mind

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a pilot study of Explicit Reading (ER), which stands for explicit representation of the implicit chunking process in the readers’ mind. A chunk is a meaningful group of words. According to psychological linguistics, reading is a cognitive process, which includes chunking words of a sentence into meaningful groups of words. In this study, a web-based reading system was built for students to read assigned short articles and manually chunk each sentence into a hierarchical chunk, which is the parsing tree of the sentence. The chunking actions are recorded and timed for further analysis. Students are clustered according to the similarity of their chunking results. Two classes of non-native speaking college students of an English course participated in this study and 22 feasible cases were collected. For a particular syntax structure, the chunking style and unit quiz score are correlated. Compared with the reference answer, even the students have high unit quiz score may conduct chunking mistakes.