When a Topic Matters to You,Does It Matter if You Read About It in a Second Language?

Abstract

Readers’ emotions often become engaged while reading and can sometimes enhance and sometimes skew text comprehension, with most research focused on reading texts in one’s native language. This project extended the work of Gaskins to explore how adolescents’ culturally constructed emotions affected their reading comprehension, and how this effect varied when reading in their first (Korean) or second (English) language. Students (N = 477) in a Korean high school read short paragraphs on four expository topics counterbalanced to represent both languages and both an emotional and neutral version of each topic. Results were that participants were more emotionally engaged and performed better on comprehension assessments when reading emotional than neutral texts. Thus, unlike Gaskin’s study, these results indicated that emotions were generally helpful for comprehension, whether the text was in the reader’s first language or a learned language, possibly by way of increasing attention and engagement with the text.