1.5) Research Hypothesis……….……………………………………………………..7 1.6) Significance of the Study……………………………………………………………7 1.7) Definitions of Key Terms ………………………………………….……………..9 1.7.1) Textual modification……………………..……………………….……………..9 1.7.2) Reading comprehension………………………………………….……………..9 1.8) Summary ………………………………………………..………………………..10 Chapter 2: Review of the Related Literature 2.0) Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………11 2.1) Theoretical framework…………………………………………………………….11 2.2) Reading Comprehension, Past and Present ………………………………..…..…15 2.2.1) The Top down (Concept-Driven) Approach ………………………..…………18 2.2.2) The Bottom up (Serial) Approach (Text-based)…………………..…..…..……19 2.2.3) The Interactive Approach ……………………………………………………….20 2.3) Schema theory ……………………………………….……………….……..…. 22 2.4) Parsing ……………………………………………….………………..…….……23 2.5) Reading materials …………………………………….……………….…….…. 24 2.5.1) Interest……………………………………………………….…………..………25 2.5.2) Objectives…………………………………………………………..……………25 2.5.3) Readability………………………………………………………..…..………..26 2.5.4) Authenticity ………………………………………………….……………..….26 2.6) Some Sources of Syntactic Complexity………………………..……………………..27 2.6.1) Surface complexity …………………………………………………………………..28 2.6.1.1) Amount ………………………………………………..……..………………..28 2.6.1.2) Density ………………………………………………….………..……..…….29 2.6.1.3) Ambiguity ……………………………………………….……………..……..29 2.6.2) Interpretive Complexity…………………………………………………………………………..29 2.6.3) Systematic Complexity …………………………………..………………………….29 2.6.3.1) Sentence Length ………………………………….……………………..……31 2.6.3.2) Preposed Clause……………………………………………………………………….31 2.6.3.3) Passive Sentences ……………………………………………………….…….32 2.6.3.4) Relative clause and Embedding ………………………………………………….…33 2.6.3.5) A Proposition-based Measure of Comprehensibility.………………………..34 2.7) Syntactic Complexity and Reading…………………………………..……..…….35 2.8) Simplification of Reading Materials ……………………………………..….…..38 2.8.1) Splitting the sentence………………………………………..…………………40 2.8.2) Changing discourse marker………………………………….………..…………41 2.8.3) Transformation to active voice …………………………….……..………….…41 2.8.4) Inversion of clause ordering ………………………………………..…………..42 2.8.5) Subject-Verb-Object ordering ………………………………..…………….….42 2.8.6) Topicalization and Detopicalization……………………….……………………42 2.9) Simplification and Authenticity…………………………………..…..………….45 2.10) Summary ………………………………………………………..………………47 Chapter 3: Methodology 3.0)Introduction……………………………………………………………………..…48 3.1) Design of the study ………………………………………………..…………..…48 3.2) Participants of the Study……………………………………..…….……………..49 3.3) Materials of the Study …………………………………………………………..……..49 3.4) Procedures of the Study………………………………………………………………..49 3.5) Statistical Collection………………………………………..………….………….50 3.7) Summary……………………………………….…………………..….…………50   Chapter 4: Results 4.0) Data Analysis and Findings …………………….……………………..…………51 4.1) Results of Hypothesis Testing ……………………………………………..….…53

4. 4. 2) Summary …………………………………………………………………………54
   5. 

Chapter 5: Discussion and Implication 5.0) Discussion ……………………………………………………………….……….55 5.1) Pedagogical Implication ……………………………………………………..…..56 5.3) Implication for teaching …………………………………………..……………..57 5.4) limitations of The Study ……………………………………….……………..…..57 5.5) Suggestions for Further Research …………………………………………………57 References ………………………..……………………………………..…..……..……..59 Appendices Appendix A: MELAB Test ………………………………………………….………..…..66 Appendix B: Pre-test (A test from Nelson-Denny Reading Comprehension Tests)…………82 Appendix C: Treatment procedure for experimental group (syntactically simplified text) …84 Appendix D: Post-test ……………………………………………………………..….87 List of Tables Title                                                                                                                           Page Table 2.1 Survey of Simplification Studies and Results……………………….……….14 Table 4.1.Group Statistics……………………………………………………………………51 Table 4.2. Independent Samples Test…………………………………………………………51 Table 4.3. Descriptive statistics and independent t-test for the comparison of pre-test results………52 Table 4.4. Independent Samples Test……………………………………………….………..53 Table 4.5. Paired Samples Test……………………………………………………….………53

Chapter One

Introduction

• • Introduction

Textual modification can be defined as any process that reduces the syntactic or lexical complexity of a text while attempting to preserve its meaning and information content. The aim of Textual modification is to make text easier to comprehend for a human user or process by a program. A common method for assessing whether a text is suitable for a particular reading age is by means of using readability metric, such as the Flesch readability score, proposed in 1943 and more recently popularized by Microsoft Word. These metrics are based solely on surface attributes of a text, such as average sentence and word lengths. The term readability is therefore a misnomer; these metrics do not attempt to judge how readable, well written or cohesive a text is, or even whether it is grammatical. Rather, they suggest what reading age a text (that is assumed to be well written, cohesive and relevant in content) is suitable for, by means of a calibration with school reading grades.

• • Theoretical Framework

Compared to controlled generation and text summarization, there has been