The Effect of Simplified and Elaborated Input on Reading Comprehension and Reading Strategy of Expository Text

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of simplification and elaboration, as two types of input modification, on reading comprehension and reading strategy use of expository text of Iranian EFL learners. Ninety five learners of English who formed three groups of simplification, elaboration and control, participated in the study. Oxford placement test (OPT), reading comprehension test and reading strategy questionnaire were used as data collection instruments. The two experimental groups studied the texts which were modified. Following Oh s (2001) strategies, the researcher added redundancy and clearer signaling of thematic structure in the form of example, paraphrase and repetition of original information, and synonyms to elaborate the expository texts. And again following Oh s (2001) strategies, to make texts simplified the researcher decreased the length of the sentences and the number of embedded clauses as well as the number of multisyllabic and low-frequency words. The control group worked with the expository texts without any simplification and elaboration. Results obtained from the one-way ANOVA analyses revealed that both simplified and elaborated input increased reading comprehension of the EFL learners as the participants in these groups outperformed the learners in control group. However, the analyses of the reading strategy use of the learners showed that just the elaborated group performed better than the other two groups. The findings suggests that input modification may be a useful technique for reading comprehension, and elaborated input, specifically, can be of particular importance in reading comprehension and reading strategy use.