The Impact of Two Types of Input Modification on EFL Reading Comprehension: Linguistic Versus Interactional

This study investigates the relative effects of two types of input modification – linguistic and interactional – on Iranian EFL students'' reading comprehension. Eight English readingpassages were presented to 248 students in one of the three forms: unmodified (U), linguistically modified (LM), mostly in the direction of elaboration, and interactionally modified (IM). The students were also divided into two proficiencylevel groups, i.e. more proficient (MP) and less proficient (LP) groups. Students'' comprehension of the passages was measured through a 50-item multiple-choice test which was the same for all the six groups. The data were analyzed by a 2-by-3 analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results show that interactional modifications improve students'' reading comprehension scores better than linguistic modifications at both proficiency levels. This suggests that linguisticmodifications – even if they are made in the direction of elaboration as suggested by recent studies (Oh, 2001; Urano, 2002; Yano et al., 1994) – do not facilitate readingcomprehension as effectively as interactional modifications do. Therefore, it is recommended that instead of making texts comprehensible through commonly-practicedtechniques of simplification or elaboration, teachers employ authentic texts, but make them comprehensible through creating interactional modifications.