A Study On The Effects Of Content And Gender In Text Comprehension In Second Language Reading

Abstract

This study aims to identify the relations between gender difference with learners’ topic familiarity and learners’ second language reading comprehension as well as to investigate the effects of gender-oriented passage content of the L2 text on learners’ comprehension. For comparative purposes, five male and five female respondents from the Faculty of Education, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia were selected. To evaluate the respondents’ reading comprehension, they were asked to recall and write the main ideas and supporting details of three types of texts which are male oriented, female oriented and neutral in a written recall task. Two sets of questionnaires were distributed to get information on the subjects’ topic familiarity and interest towards the topics as well as the difficulty level of the reading texts. The result shows that gender difference influence learners’ topic familiarity and therefore affects their L2 reading comprehension. Suggestions for pedagogical implementation and future research were also made.