Mental Pollution Impedes Foreign Language Reading Comprehension

The same Turkish foreign language learners of a university preparatory school (N=35) were tested twice on the same preintermediate reading passage within one month interval. In the first condition students were given the reading test (pre-test) during the class time upon watching a documentary on wild life for 40 minutes. After a month before they were given the same reading test (post –test) in the same classroom setting, they were shown mental pollutants a compilation of various videos with violent, scary, erotic, and comedic content from popular video-sharing websites for 40 minutes. It was hypothesized that mental pollutants would contaminate students’ mind by distracting emotional states and slowing mental processes and thus impeding the comprehension of foreign language reading material. The statistical results based on T-test Paired Samples Statistics and OneSample Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test show that exposure to mental pollutants remarkably results in poor L2 reading comprehension.