Abstract
This research investigated how English learners could retell two types of passages with culturally familiar and unfamiliar topics. The oral retelling was used to measure the fourteen teenage participants’ reading comprehension of twelve English passages with Chinese and non-Chinese topics. The participants’ retelling protocols were categorized into ways of synthesizing information. The research firstly examined whether there was difference of English learners’ ways of synthesizing information between the two types of passages. The results showed that there was no significant difference between the participants’ approach for the Chinese and non-Chinese topic passages. The participants appear to have displayed awareness of the macrostructure in a text and then combined some micro-propositions in the text to make a synthesized statement over culturally familiar and unfamiliar topic passages. Secondly, synthesizing information was classified by function and by strategy to explain how English learners utilized the synthesizing process to comprehend an English passage on Chinese versus non-Chinese topics. Thirdly, the process of how the participants utilized prior knowledge to produce synthesizing information was explained. In the last section of the paper, the researcher presented some recommendations for classroom practice in an effort to help language teachers apply the results of the study to the actual instructional contexts.

Key Words: English learners; synthesizing information; culturally familiar and unfamiliar topics; cross-cultural prior knowledge

Introduction
A growing number of researchers in the field of reading comprehension have agreed with the concept that the reader’s prior knowledge can affect the degree of text comprehension. Several earlier reading comprehension studies have confirmed that the knowledge a person has is understood to have a potential influence on what he or she will learn and read. Anderson, Reynolds, Schallert, and Goetz (1977) believed that “every act of comprehension involves one’s knowledge of the world” (p.369). “A reader’s knowledge determines to a large extent the meaning that he derives from a text” (Kintsch and van Dijk, 1978, p.371). Fagan (1987) prefaced his book with the following remarks about the essential role of knowledge in learning, “learning is the freedom and challenge to play with knowledge – to experience it, to reflect on it, to evaluate it, and to change it” (p. iii).

Furthermore, a large number of empirical studies have demonstrated that the impact of prior knowledge on reading comprehension is significant (Afflerbach, 1990; Dochy, 1992; McKeown, Beck, Sinatra, & Loxterman, 1992). The lack of it might have an impact on text “reconstruction” in which the reader’s comprehension of the text was minimal (Bernhardt, 1990). More recently, prior knowledge has been further proved to have great effects on the reader’s retrieval of textual information (Caillies, Denhire, and Kintsch; 2002; Vacca, R. T., & Vacca, J. L., 2002); and can be a significant predictor of the student’s achievement in the area of content reading (Yenilmez, Sungur, Takkaya, 2006). 

With such an important role, prior knowledge is viewed as a key resource in the meaning construction of the reading process. The constructive orientation of the recent reading comprehension research has highlighted comprehension as a constructive process. With this aspect, reading can be regarded as “the act of constructing meaning while transacting with text” (Ruddell, 2005, p.30). A construction process in which “a textbase is constructed from the linguistic input as well as from the comprehender’s knowledge base, with an integration phase, in which this textbase is integrated into a coherent whole” (Kintsch, 1988, p.53). The constructive process transacts with various sources, like readers’ prior knowledge accumulated from previous life experience, the information conveyed in the text, and immediate social interaction and communication (Cambourne, 2002; Gee; 2001; Van Den Broek & Kremer, 2000). Before detailing the research design, however, the paper first turns to what the pertinent cognitive science tells us about the reader’s cognitive process involved in reading (Fagan, 1987; Kintsch, 1998), and the studies of prior knowledge in the context of second language (L2) reading comprehension.

Cognitive Reading Processes
In the field of cognitive science, reading can be viewed as a literacy process inextricably connected with cognition (Ruddell, 2005). By cognitive reading processes, Fitzgerald (1995) explained that this refers to “any internal or mental aspects of reading” (p.146). The internal cognitive operations the reader engages in can be labeled variously in terms of different reading task demands and different levels of cognitive behavior. For example, as Fagan (1987) proposed, these processes included attending, analyzing, associating, predicting, inferring, synthesizing, generalizing, and monitoring and these processes might operate on various sizes of text units. Fagan (1987) explained that the operation of these processes depended on the reader purpose. However, all cognitive processes require knowledge (Kintsch, 1998). Prior knowledge will then be added as a factor influencing the operation of theses cognitive processes. 

Macrostructure Formation during Comprehension
In a technical sense, Kintsch (2004) conceptualized comprehension as another paradigm for cognition. Relying on the support from several experimental studies, Kintsch (1998) claimed that macrostructure formation occurred as an integral part of comprehension (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Guindon & Kintsch, 1984; Lorch, Lorch, & Mathews, 1985). According to Kintsch (1998), during the process of comprehension, a reader can select a macroproposition and delete several micropropositions. Thus, in forming a generalization, several micropropositions can be replaced by an appropriate macro proposition (Kintsch, 1998). For Kintsch, the formation of macroproposition is the process of reduction.

The present study applied Kintsch’s model of macrostructure formation to the field of L2 reading comprehension to examine whether L2 readers can as well produce such kind of macrostructures by reducing and replacing the microprositions in the text. In addition to the reducing and replacing function of macrostructures, the current study further provides additional explanation about the functions of macrostructures in L2 reading comprehension.  

Effectiveness of Prior Knowledge in L2 Reading Comprehension
In the field of L2 reading comprehension research, the effectiveness of prior knowledge has also been investigated. In previous studies where the distinction between cultural specific prior knowledge and cross-cultural prior knowledge has been used as a key variable, the effects of cultural specific prior knowledge and global knowledge of the world still compete with each other. For example, research on the effects of content schemata held the perspective that L2 readers’ culturally specific schemata might cause reading difficulty. Therefore, comprehension of a culturally unfamiliar text was more difficult than comprehension of a culturally familiar text (Anderson, 1994; Carrell, 1987; Pang, Muaka, Bernhardt, & Kamil, 2003; Steffensen, Joag-dev, & Anderson, 1979). On the other hand, readers’ comprehension of text could be attributed to cross-cultural prior knowledge, which was not culturally bound but a global knowledge of the world. Some parts of this type of knowledge in some studies could be termed as subject knowledge or content knowledge which might as well, to some degree, facilitate L2 students’ reading comprehension (Brantmeier, 2005, Bügel & Buunk, 1996; Hammadou, 2000; Young & Oxford, 1997).

So, although the importance of cross-cultural prior knowledge and the function of a synthesizing process (that is, the formation of macrostructures) have been understood, no empirical research in the Asian L2 context has yet explored the possible impact of these factors. Given the stakes involved, the current study examined whether differences would appear within specific disciplines in the process of L2 reading comprehension. In this study, the cognitive process the researcher dealt with was a synthesizing process, adopted from Fagan’s term for the generative cognitive process. Synthesizing involved readers’ “awareness of the whole” (Fagan, 1987, p.65). During the process of reading, readers tended to “search for a unity or integration within the information presented” (Fagan, 1987, p.65). The process of synthesizing was supposed to collapse specific information into different meaningful units and then integrate the individual units into one.

Restraints and Conflicts in Previous Research
From reviewed literature on the role of prior knowledge in L2 reading comprehension, the research on synthesizing comprehension process, that is, the process of the reader’s using prior knowledge to synthesize the information in the text, especially the cultural specific text, still needs more attention. In the past decades, most researchers have tried to combine other variables to examine the effects of prior knowledge, such as text types, test types, the familiarity of topics, the participant’s interests, gender or age. The cognitive process variable, the synthesizing process, has not been examined closely. Besides, Cohen, Rosenbaum-Cohen, Ferrara, & Fine’s (1988) study that has investigated this issue showed the inconsistent results with those of Kintsch’s (1998) macrostructure formation assumption. Cohen et al. (1988) used second-year students with different academic backgrounds at Hebrew University as participants. Cohen and his colleagues (1988) found that unlike the native English speakers, the nonnative English speakers did not attune to recognizing the conjunctive words, like however, also, finally and thus. Thus, they concluded that the nonnatives had more trouble synthesizing the information at the intra- and inter sentential levels as well as across paragraphs than the natives did. With such conflicting opinions, this current study examined English learners’ synthesizing cognitive process to aid our understanding of EFL/ESL readers’ comprehending the written materials.

Methodology Elaboration
In this study, the researcher elaborated on the methodology used in previous research by Cohen et al. (1988) and in previous research on the issue of macrostruture. The research hoped to further provide factual accounts of FL/ESL/EFL readers’ synthesizing process.

In the above experiments for measuring macrostructure comprehension (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Guindon & Kintsch, 1984; Lorch, Lorch, & Mathews, 1985), these researchers focused on the recognition task to study the speed and accuracy with which reading times for topic and detail sentences were calculated, and words from topic and detail sentences were recognized. Beyond the recognition priming, the current study used the retelling technique to examine how L2 readers form macrostructures. As used to analyze readers’ retellings, synthesized information at intra- and inter sentential levels might “[come] from more than one part of the passage” (Alberta Education, 1986, p. 44) and included synthesis of single words, clauses, phrases, or sentences. For a higher level of synthesizing information, the reader might reconstruct the author’s words and ideas and produce synthesizing information across paragraphs.

The Cohen et al study (1988) used just one passage to explore the subject’s synthesizing process, but this is not enough. Also, to show the reader’s dynamic development of reading process, the present study increased the number of the topics to prolong the period of data collection. The Cohen et al. study (1988) focused on the multifaceted nature of interactive L2 reading in English for science and technology; thus, the topic of text in their study was related to the participants’ academic backgrounds. To generate a concept of English learners’ general English reading, the present study added more topics that did not demand discipline-specific information. 

Research Purpose and Research Questions
In accordance with previous research’s advocacy of the important role of the reader’s prior knowledge in comprehension, the purpose of the research is first to examine the effects of prior knowledge on L2 readers’ synthesizing process of the text with cultural specific topics (Chinese topics and non Chinese topics). The study is also to explore how English learners apply their prior knowledge to comprehend English passages with Chinese and non-Chinese topics.

Three research questions were formulated to guide this study:

1. Is there a difference between English learners’ synthesizing information while retelling passages with Chinese versus non-Chinese topics?
2. How do English learners utilize the synthesizing process to comprehend an English passage on Chinese versus non-Chinese topics?
3. How do English learners use prior knowledge to produce synthesizing information?

Methodology
Participants
The participants in the study were from a senior high school in Taipei, Taiwan. Taipei is the capital of Taiwan and has a population of about two million. The Taiwanese senior high school generally includes Grade 10 to Grade 12. In Taiwan, Mandarin is the official language though other dialects are also spoken. The most commonly used foreign language is English. English is instructed as a subject in Taiwanese school curricula where Mandarin is the language of instruction.

    In Taiwan there were few studies using high school students as participants and no standardized reading test was used to demonstrate high school students’ English general reading ability. In this study, the researcher considered the students’ cultural background and made an adapted Informal Reading Inventory (IRI). The articles were separately adopted from the inventories by Bader (1998), Flynt and Cooter (1999), Leslie and Caldwell (2001), and Swearingen and Allen (2000). After each student was given an English reading test through the IRI, 14 Grade 11 senior high school students were selected from the volunteer pool of 97 to join the study. According to the results of the IRI, their English reading proficiency level was at the grade seven instructional level. The rationale for using this level of students as participants was that according to teachers’ comments on this group of participants’ general English ability, their English academic achievements were at the top ten from the highest scores in their class and they were able to and would be better able to express their own opinions. In order to collect sufficient verbal data, the researcher used this level of students as a beginning point to examine high school students’ reading comprehension.

The Procedure of the Study
The study began with a retelling practice session. The participants had not had the experience of doing retelling. In order to ensure that all participants would have the necessary abilities to retell the passage in Mandarin, a practice session was offered prior to eliciting the retelling protocols used for analysis. Once the performances of all participants in the retelling practice session were estimated to be satisfactory, each participant then joined the retelling meetings. The meeting was individual and each participant read and retold one passage in a meeting. After each retelling meeting, the researcher had an immediate interview with each participant to confirm some vague description in his/her retellings.

The Retelling Assessment Technique
The researcher conducted a descriptive study to explore English learners’ retelling response by using the following framework adapted from the Diagnosis Reading Program (DRP) by Alberta Education Student Evaluation (1986). This program was designed to provide teachers in Alberta, Canada with a systematic approach to observing and interpreting students’ strengths and weaknesses in reading. To be noticeable, the task of retelling conducted in this study is slightly different from that of recall. The retelling technique encourages participants to retell the story in their own words. With such perspective, participants may be encouraged to restate the essential part of the original text, relate what they knew about the content of the text and to reconstruct the information they have just read without looking at the passage again (McCormick & Cooper, 1991).

The recall process usually involves having subjects recall, either in written or oral model, everything that they can remember of the text after his/her reading of the text by not looking back at the assigned reading material. Under such situation, “free recall tests may measure comprehension, but they also depend very heavily on memory capacity” (Bügel & Buunk, 1996, p. 18). Also, the scoring of the written recall protocols put much emphasis on checking the spelling and calculating the numbers of the correct ideas recalled from the text. To improve the recall task done in previous research (Bernhardt, 1990, 1991; Brantmeier, 2005; Carrell, 1984, 1987; Heinz, 2004; Regina, 1998), the instruction wording in this study was changed to the following, “After your reading, you will retell the content of the passage to a friend who has never heard or read it before”. In this study, the participant retold the passage orally but not in a written way.

Materials
In this study, twelve passages were used as reading materials for the retellings. Six passages have topics on Chinese culture, describing some ancient Chinese historical events, figures, and customs. They include Chinese Farming (CF1), Chinese New Year (CNY3), Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (SYS5), The Great Wall (GW7), The History of Tea (HT9), and Cooking and Eating (CE11). The Chinese passages were selected from the following sources: China: Our Pacific neighbour (Evans & Yu, 1992), Children of the world: China, (Talan & Sherwood, 1988), and Ancient China (Sabin, 1985). The other six passages have topics on non-Chinese culture including Canadian and European historical events, peoples, and customs. They are River of Salmon (RS2), Railway across Canada (RC4), First Peoples in Canada (FPC6), Easter (EAS8), Fishing in Canada (FC10), and Ways of Sending a Message (WSM12). The Canadian passages were selected from, Connections Canada (Francis, 2000) and Young Students Encyclopedia (Blashfield, 1973). Owing to the participants being at a seventh-grade reading level, the readability level of the passages was at seventh-grade -- as determined with the assistance of the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Index in Microsoft Word. The statistical results of the 12 passages received from the Index are demonstrated in Table 1. This index is a computerized program used to determine the difficulty of books or reading material. By doing this, the participants at this level are supposed to be able to comprehend the text fitting their reading abilities.

Table 1 - Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Indexes of the passages

Scoring and Labeling the Participants’ Retelling Protocols
After the participant finished retelling, the researcher transcribed the recorded retelling in Mandarin and further translated it into English. Then the researcher adopted the DRP procedure for judging the students’ retellings and divided the participants’ retellings into smaller meaningful independent units called thought units. A thought unit is a group of words representing a syntactically grammatical and meaningful unit of information represented in a text or retold by the participants. For example, one simple sentence is regarded as one unit for it conveys a piece of meaningful information independently.
After the participant’s retelling was divided into thought units, the parsed retelling information was further screened and labeled into synthesizing information (S). The thought units of this category were then summed up (see the sample of how to label the synthesizing retelling information in Appendix). To ensure the credibility of the analysis, the researcher asked another PH. D. student who was a native English speaker as a second rater.

The inter-rater agreement is established by randomly selecting ten of the 168 (14 participants x 12 topics) retelling protocols. It is a mean score of ten percentages of agreement. “The percentage of agreement equals the number of agreements divided by the total number of agreements and disagreements multiplied by 100:

“Percentage of agreement = [agreements/(agreements + disagreements0)] x 100” (Martella, Nelson, Marchand-Martella, 1999, p.84). For example, the percentage of inter-rater agreement of synthesizing unit parsing is 91 %. The calculation would have been as follows: For one retelling protocol, 9 agreements/[9 agreements + 1 disagreements] with the result of .90 multiplied by 100. Similarly, the rest of the nine percentages were calculated in this way, summed up and divided by 10; the averaged inter-rater agreement for parsing the participant’s retelling into synthesizing units (91%) was thus achieved. 91% can be a high level of inter-rater agreement between the researcher and the second rater.

Results and Discussion

Synthesizing Information

The statistic analysis in Tables 2 and 3 provided the answer to the first research question. Since the observations are paired in questions as shown in Tables 2 and 3, according to the result of the paired t test (the t value is equal 0.83 with 13 degrees of freedom, which is smaller than the two-tail critical value, 2.16), there is no significant difference in the participants’ synthesizing information when retelling the passages with (on) Chinese and those with non-Chinese topics. The possible reason can be that the participants may have had the competence of an awareness of the macrosturures and then combine some information in the text to make a synthesized statement over the passage on culturally familiar and unfamiliar topic.

Table 2 - Means and Standard Deviations for Synthesizing Information

Chinese

Table 3 - Means and Standard Deviations for Synthesizing Information

Non-Chinese

The detailed interpretation of the possible reasons was described in the following section and at the same the interpretation was the respond to the second research question. Synthesizing information in the participant’s retellings was classified by function (integrated, reconstructing, and reducing synthesizes), by strategy (synthesizes for opening a talk, filling the gap). Each classification was illustrated with the participant’s retellings. The third research question was answered with the application of cross-cultural knowledge.

A process of integration 
As for what Fagan (1987) stated, the synthesizing retellings showed that the reader tended to seek for an integration among pieces of written information. In the current study, most participants generalized ideas from several sentences and produced a larger gist. That is, one synthesizing statement extracted the words directly from two or three sentences and interweaved another new statement. Such kind of synthesizing information from the participants’ retelling for the first paragraph of the passage Easter was used to illustrate this process. For a clear explanation, the first paragraph of the original passage was presented and each sentence from the first one was numbered from 1 (see Table 4). The participant’s retellings were also marked with numbers that were the sentence numbers in the original passage. The data in Table 4 shows that most of their synthesizing information is at inter-sentential level connecting several parts from sentences in the paragraph.

Table 4 - The Original Passage and Participants’ Retellings

A process of reconstruction 
Kintsch (1998) mentioned that in forming a generalization, several micropropositions could be replaced by an appropriate macroproposition. In this study, the participant reconstructed the meaning of the text by using his/her own words rather than the author’s words. Such kind of synthesizing information usually conveys the essential meaning presented in sentences. For example, the participant Tom produced a statement for the first paragraph of the passage, Easter, “This is about the time when Easter comes each year.”  
Fagan (1987) proposed this type of synthesis involving the embedding of essential information from different syntactic units. An example of such kind of synthesis is cited from Fagan’s (1987) book (p.66):

Text: Mr. Smith owns a German Shepherd. It is black. One day it broke its leash. It ran down the street. It attacked a small boy.

Synthesis: One day Mr. Smith’s black German Shepherd broke its leash, ran down the street and attacked a small boy.
Fagan (1987) explained that it could not be easy for a reader to undergo such process of synthesizing at this level in an impromptu situation. “The greater the number of structures from which information must be embedded, the more difficult the task” (Frase, 1970, cited from Fagan, 1987, p.66). This finding suggests that for English learners at the age of 16 with Grade 7 English reading abilities, a higher level of synthesis can be achieved.

A process of deletion   
As Kintsch (1998) pointed out, macrostructure could be formed by the deletion of insignificant details. In this study, the participant retold a generalized statement by reducing some minor details, especially those with unfamiliar vocabulary. The examples withdrawn from Brian’s and Dick’s retellings of the Easter passage are as follows: 

  It probably comes after March 21, the first full moon, then probably between at the end of March and at the end of April, one Sunday is Easter. (Brian)
Then Easter usually comes on a different each year because it takes place on the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21. (Dick)

From the examples, the participants summarized a segment of the text about the fact when Easter comes every year. In the interview, the participants expressed that they did not use much of their life experience to understand this part because they did not have this holiday in Taiwan. They stated that they had no idea about the words the spring equinox, so they skipped retelling the segment with unknown vocabulary in it, and thus made a generalized statement for the paragraph with their general knowledge of date sequence. This situation can be explained by Kinstch’s (1988) model of text recall.

[A] subject selects a path through the network that forms the mental representation of the text. Those nodes that are not on that path are automatically deleted when recalling the text (cited from Kintsch, 1993, p. 196). 

A pragmatic strategy of opening a talk and filling up the gap
After reading a passage, the participant was to retell the passage. In the beginning section of most retelling meetings, there was a period of silence. Most participants usually prefaced their retelling with a short over-generalization for the whole passage, such as:

This article talks about Easter. (Brian)
This is about First peoples in Canada. (Jim)
Dr. Sun-Yat Sen is a great man. This article is about him. (Jane)

As shown in the above, the underlined words were the topics of the passages. Most participants directly used the topic to produced such synthesizes. These broad over-generalizations were still categorized as synthesizing information in this study although they were a much different synthesis that did not exactly summarize main ideas from the original text. Such over-generalizations could be a strategy they used to opening their talk.

Besides, this format could be a strategy to fill up the blank during their retelling or also when they had trouble understanding the content. For example, when facing the trouble of retelling the third paragraph of the passage Easter, some participants with high motivation would try to solve the silent, embarrassing moment and made some response. Their resolutions were to quickly squeeze some vague generalizations, such as the following retelling:

The whole week, people do these things. (Tom)
From Monday to Friday, there are lots of activities. (Kevin)
Christians did some activities in a week. (Victoria)

In the interview, the researcher asked Tom what these things were then. He answered that he had no idea about that. Another participant Victoria explained that she could only recognize the words, Christ, week, Thursday, Friday, so she combined these words and made such response. However, she had no exact idea about these activities before the holiday, Easter.

Utilization of cross-cultural prior knowledge
In this study, the participant expressed that they did not have much of prior knowledge about non-Chinese topics, so they mostly could not retell many detailed contents of the passage but they could retell synthesizing information.

For Taiwanese students in this study, their cross-cultural prior knowledge may include knowledge shared between Taiwan, Canada and some European countries. For example, in the interview, most participants indicated that they did not have much prior knowledge about the first peoples in Canada but they knew what aboriginal people were. The following synthesizing information from the participants’ retelling protocols demonstrated Taiwanese students’ applying cross-cultural prior knowledge to retell the passage First Peoples in Canada:

The aboriginal people make a living by hunting in the woods, and fishing in the lake. (Amy)  
The aboriginal people use the wood to build a house. (Tom)
The aboriginal people make clothes from animal skins or fur. (Jeff)   

One possible reason for this is that there are several groups of aboriginal people residing in Taiwan. With the government’s advocacy of protecting the culture of Taiwanese aborigines and the study of local culture in the course, Social Science, the students had been educated about aboriginal cultures and learn general knowledge of how aboriginal peoples make a living. Some concepts included in the passage First Peoples in Canada were related to Taiwanese students’ cross-cultural prior knowledge about the aboriginal peoples in Taiwan. As a result, Taiwanese students could make use of their cross-cultural prior knowledge in this area to embed a synthesized statement from this passage. This finding suggests that cross-cultural knowledge assists the reader to search for potential relevant information in memory and thus retell synthesizing information for the passages on Chinese and non-Chinese topics.

Summary
After discussing different phenomena of the participants’ retelling synthesizing information, general findings can be summed up to show that the production of synthesizing information may primarily depend on the participant’s prior knowledge. If the participant lacks culturally specific knowledge about the text, he/she may further rely on his/her cross-cultural prior knowledge and thus synthesize information in an ambiguous, generalized way. In this study, the passages with non-Chinese topics may include several messages related to culturally specific prior knowledge and also, in some part, to cross-cultural prior knowledge. When retelling the passages with non-Chinese topics, synthesizing information may occur as often as in passages with Chinese topics. Therefore, there is no difference found in synthesizing information between the two types of passages. Consistent with Bernhardt’s opinion (1990), this study also finds that if the participant has neither culturally specific knowledge nor cross-cultural prior knowledge, most of the message in the text cannot be synthesized.

Recommendations
In this study, the general finding is that the participants may have the competence of an awareness of the whole and then combine some information in the text to make a synthesized statement for culturally familiar and unfamiliar topics. It can be noted that the retold synthesizing information is directly related to the participants’ ability to capture some information in the text and reconstruct the relations between the information. Given the participant’s process of synthesizing in reading comprehension, some practical recommendations for classroom practice were suggested.

First, Kitsch (1998) stated that “a well-organized macrostructure is crucial for understanding and remembering a text”. In this study, most participants could provide a synthesized topic statement in the beginning of their retellings. This result recommends that the instructor notify the students the text with a topic or a paragraph with a topic sentence. The topic may provide a direction for the reader to retrieve his/her prior knowledge. This finding can also suggest that the instructor may lead the students to read a passage without a topic first and ask them to assign a topic for the passage they have just read.

Second, the study finds that the synthesizing information integrates main ideas from several sentences. The teaching activity can be that after learners finish reading a passage, the instructor asks them to figure out the essential parts in the passage and use the following patterns to lead them to describe the generalized concepts of the segments of a text, such as, “The couple of sentences is about yyy,” “This paragraph is about xxx,” or “The whole passage is about XXX.” These patterns are designed to train English learners to integrate ideas from fewer and smaller proposition in the text to form larger proposition.

Third, the result of this study shows that the participants still can do well in synthesizing the information from the English passages on non-Chinese topics. The result recommends that except the familiar topics, the teacher can lead the student to read a passage on unfamiliar topic to produce synthesizing retellings as long as the readability of the passage fits English learners’ English reading ability. Confronting the passage on unfamiliar topics, students can be activated to identify main ideas from details and further delete minor details to generate macrostructural statements for the passage. By doing this, students can be trained to focus on macropropositions in the passage rather than on each single word. 

Fourth, the general task of synthesizing information may include the ability to give summary statements, which adequately reflect the essence of small parts in a text. The summarizing procedure essentially involves a series of deletions and generalizations (Farstrup & Samuels, 2002). Summary writing can be suggested. In this study, the researcher recommended another way of summary writing. Teachers may also focus on the summary retelling activity for collapsing a whole paragraph into smaller meaningful chunks, pointing out essential features in each chunk, and then asking learners to integrate the essential features in larger synthesizing statements. The teacher may encourage the policy that the number of the sentence statements is the fewer, the better in terms of making use of all marked essential parts. To encourage learners to produce sufficient retellings, sentence grammatical structure is not highly emphasized here. The following is an example of the teaching material for activating synthesizing process provided from the researcher’s classroom instruction:

Text: Some things around us live. . . . Things that live need air. Things that live need food. Things that live need water. Things that live move and grow. Animals are living things. Plants are living things (Leslie & Caldwell, 2001, p. 155).
Synthesis: Things that live around us need air, food and water. Some living things can move and grow, like animals and plants.

Fifth, the results of this study illuminate the importance of English learners’ cross-cultural knowledge. Prior to this study, most Taiwanese senior high school students to some degree have studied several subjects such as Math, History, Geography, Science and Chinese Language Arts in school. Some of them can be academically proficient and have learned some knowledge in these subjects. To some degree, the subject knowledge is cross-culture. However, the subject knowledge is in Mandarin. The instructor may try to transfer their Mandarin prior knowledge into English prior knowledge while reading a new English passage. The instructor encourages the reader to make use of his/her cross-cultural knowledge to comprehend the text.  

Conclusion
In this study, this group of teenagers has proved that they have the ability to retell synthesizing information over familiar and unfamiliar topic passages with the assistance of their prior knowledge. The general result from this study was consistent with Kintsch’s (1998) claim that macrostructure formation occurred as an integral part of comprehension. Moreover, the results of the study provide further evidence in the field of prior knowledge studies to ensure the essential impact of the cross-cultural knowledge (Brantmeier, 2005; Hammadou, 2000). More than that, the findings of the study suggest that the reader’s cross-cultural knowledge can facilitate English learners to operate a synthesizing process.

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Appendix

Sample for Categorizing the Synthesizing Retelling Information.
This is about the story of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. (S) /[He was a], He came out to save China when the government in China was in the weakest condition. (S) / He wanted to change the government in China, [the emperor, that is, to abolish the monarchy / and used the western republic government system. (S) / [Then] he caused a revolution / and needed money so he asked for the support from the people overseas /and he had been to Canada for three times to raise money. / [Then he,] He in 1911, finally succeeded, [succeeded] in the revolution /and set up a new republic government. (S) / It is a pity that he did not live long enough to lead the new Chinese government. / [Then] the result is that the warlord, Yuan Shih-Kai succeeded him and turned to be a leader to lead the whole China. / [Then] warlords are those who own armies and control them. / [Then] warlords themselves did not understand Dr. Sun-Yat’s idealization. (S) / [Then] they destroyed Chinese people’s lives / and invaded their land. / People did not have enough food. / The people had little hope for the future/

where S = 6
               
Note: Parentheses were used around mazes. A maze consists of “irrelevant information”, such as noises (er, um, or uh), self-corrections (then she asked her tech, teacher), repetitions of words (when, when . . . and he, and then he), and personal comments about the passage (That’s all, I don’t remember any more, or I like that story) (Alberta Education, 1986, p.42).