INVESTIGATING TEXT-PROCESSING SKILLS OF EFL STUDENTS: A COMPARISON OF EXPLICIT AND INFERENTIAL COMPREHENSION ITEMS
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The aim of this paper is to determine whether reading proficiency is a significant predictor of English as a Foreign Language learners’ performance on reading test questions targeting explicit and inferential information when controlling for language proficiency. For this purpose, a total of 38 university students who are taking a course in English as a faculty requirement completed a reading comprehension test with items testing local textual information (locating facts, paraphrasing information, recognizing stated facts) and global textual information (identifying main idea and establishing connections). The participants were first divided into high- and low-proficiency groups based on their scores and then compared by means of a mixed between-within subjects analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The results indicate that the participants varied in their ability to identify factual information and to make inferences based on stated information with respect to their reading proficiency, and, to a lesser extent, their overall foreign language proficiency, but not as a result of the interaction between these two factors. This finding offers practical support in favour of the Linguistic interdependence hypothesis, which proposes that reading performance in a foreign language is shared to a large degree with reading ability in a first language and with a general reading ability not tied to any specific language.
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