Impact of prior knowledge, rhetoricalpatterns,and gender differences on readingcomprehension of Iranian EFL students / Maryam Jalilehvand
According to the schema theory, reading comprehension involves interaction between a text and a reader. This interaction involves the reader’s prior knowledge of the subject on the one hand, and the rhetorical structure of the text on the other hand. Therefore, the current study examines the impa...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Published: |
2014
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| Online Access: | http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/4665/1/Maryam_Jalilehvand_Thesis_July_2014.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/4665/ |
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| Summary: | According to the schema theory, reading comprehension involves interaction
between a text and a reader. This interaction involves the reader’s prior knowledge of the
subject on the one hand, and the rhetorical structure of the text on the other hand. Therefore,
the current study examines the impact of three independent variables (prior knowledge,
rhetorical pattern, and gender) on students’ reading comprehension. In Iran, many high
school students have difficulty in comprehending reading texts. Their L2 reading
comprehension scores indicate that they are not performing well. Many studies have been
done to investigate the influence of some factors on reading comprehension. However, the
influences of prior knowledge, rhetorical pattern, and gender differences on reading
comprehension simultaneously have been neglected. Guided by this view, this study is an
attempt to examine the simultaneous impact of prior knowledge, rhetorical pattern, and
gender on reading comprehension through detailed analysis of 232 high school major
students. Statistical analysis including three-way ANOVA was applied on the collected data.
The sample consists of 72 male and 160 female students from high schools in
Savojbolagh County in Iran. The participants are from the same level of proficiency. Using
a between-subjects design, participants were divided into eight groups. For each of four
groups of readers (females and males), two texts had familiar content with description or
causation pattern, and two other texts had unfamiliar content with description or causation
pattern. Each group was asked to recall the text and finish a cloze test after reading each of
the four passages. Recall protocols (recall of idea units and importance level) and cloze test
were used as the measures of reading comprehension.
Both recall protocol and cloze test analysis revealed that participants displayed
better recall of the familiar text than the unfamiliar text, which suggests that prior
knowledge has a facilitating effect on reading comprehension. Moreover, like many
previous researches, this study found that the rhetorical pattern had a significant effect on
recall. The comparison of means and standard deviations between groups at each level
indicated that the students benefited more by causative text than by descriptive text. The
results showed that prior knowledge and rhetorical pattern were two strong predictors of
performance. Gender did not have a significant effect on subjects’ comprehension except for
v
the cloze test. In the light of two-way interaction effect between variables, there was also a
statistically significant interaction effect between prior knowledge and gender. More
interestingly, the results of the three-way ANOVA indicated that there was not any
statistically significant interaction effect between prior knowledge, rhetorical pattern, and
gender. In other words, the findings showed that a two-way interaction between prior
knowledge and rhetorical pattern was not moderated by gender. Overall, this study suggests
that prior knowledge and rhetorical pattern are two critical variables which may improve
students’ reading comprehension. These results have practical implications in the EFL and
ESL fields. Moreover, this research makes recommendations for further research on EFL
reading. |
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