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Effects on Reading Comprehension of Language Complexity and Cultural Background of a Text
Author(s) -
Johnson Patricia
Publication year - 1981
Publication title -
tesol quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.737
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1545-7249
pISSN - 0039-8322
DOI - 10.2307/3586408
Subject(s) - reading comprehension , linguistics , reading (process) , comprehension , psychology , sociology , philosophy
The present study investigated the effects of the complexity of the English language and the cultural origin of prose on the reading comprehension of 46 Iranian intermediate/advanced ESL students at the university level. Half of the subjects read the unadapted English texts of two stories, one from Iranian folklore and one from American folklore; the other half read the same stories in adapted or simplified English. The subjects were tested on reading comprehension through the use of multiple choice questions on explicit and implicit information in the texts. The recall questions on the stories were also given to 19 American subjects for comparison purposes. Multivariate analysis of variance indicated that the cultural origin of the story had more effect on the comprehension of the ESL students than the level of syntactic and semantic complexity, adapted vs. unadapted. For native English readers, however, both the level of syntactic and semantic complexity of the text and the cultural origin of the story affected comprehension. The native language readers were better able to understand un‐adapted English and the story based on American folklore. Implications of this study for teaching and for materials selection and design are discussed.