Explanation expectancy is the expectation that a person will explain the contents of a text to another person after reading it him/herself. This study aimed to investigate whether explanation expectancy improves a deeper level of text comprehension by Chinese native speakers who are advanced learners of Japanese. I also investigated whether the individual receiving the explanation-a junior high school or college student-plays a role in reading comprehension. The 46 Chinese participants were divided into three groups: 17 participants for explanation expectancy to a junior high school student group. 14 participants for explanation expectancy to a college student group and 15 participants for test expectancy group. All the participants read a Japanese text. They answered three types of comprehension questions about the text. and they gave their ratings (on a five-point scale) to all sentences of the text with respect to how important they believed it to be to the expected explanation. From the results, it was evident that neither explanation expectancy nor the type of target individual had a significant impact on the participants' reading comprehension. However. the group that were expecting to provide an explanation to a junior high school student rated the summary part of the text as being of higher importance than the test expectancy group. This suggests that explanation expectancy may affect information structuring during the reading of L2 texts.

本稿は，2014年度留学生教育学会第19回JAISE研究大会での口頭発表の内容を加箪・修正したものである。