earticle

영어

This study aims to examine the effect of the use of concept mapping on Korean college students’ English reading comprehension depending on the text complexity and English proficiency. It also investigates whether or not concept mapping has an effect on reading comprehension test scores according to two different types of test item types(bottom-up items and top-down items). Two hundred one college students(high, middle, low English proficiency groups), who were divided into the control group and the experimental group(concept mapping group), participated in the study and experimental group students only used concept mapping as a top-down reading strategy. One-way ANOVA was employed to analyze the collected data. The results showed that first, the concept mapping strategy had significantly positive influence on English reading comprehension of the complex text. Secondly, there were interactional effects between the concept mapping strategy and English proficiency on English reading comprehension. Lastly, the concept mapping strategy improved the students’ top-down test item scores of the complex text. Pedagogical implications were also presented.