Exploring the Relationship between Reading Maturity, Reading Strategy Use, and Gender with Reading Comprehension of EFL Undergraduates in Iran
Tez Türü: Yüksek Lisans
Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Shiraz University, School of Languages and Literature, Foreign Languages and Linguistics, İran
Tez Danışmanı: Professor Dr. Saeed Mehrpour
Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2014
Tezin Dili: İngilizce
Özet:
This research
investigated the relationship between reading maturity, reading strategy use,
and gender with Iranian EFL undergraduates' reading comprehension. The results
revealed that the most preferred strategies were cognitive in nature. Moreover,
the Iranian EFL undergraduates were intellectually enriched by most of what
they read and enjoy reading materials that teach them the things that they did
not know before. Also, it was found that the most observable effect of gender
was on interpreting the text while reading, followed by reading the text again
when some parts are difficult to understand. In both of these cognitive
strategies, females outperformed the male students in using these two
strategies. Furthermore, no correlation was observed between the most
applicable reading strategy (b6: I read the text again when some parts
are difficult to understand) and reading comprehension. What's more, there was
no correlation between reading maturity and reading comprehension. However, it
was proved that there was a significant correlation between gender and reading
comprehension. Reading maturity and the most applicable reading comprehension
strategy (b6) had no significant correlation with reading comprehension as
shown by the multiple regression results while gender revealed such a
correlation. There was no significant correlation between the most applicable
reading strategy (b6) and reading maturity. Furthermore, there was no
relationship between gender and the mentioned reading maturity subgroups (c,
d, e, and g) but gender correlated between subgroups f
and h. At last, it was found that there was no relationship between
gender and the most applicable reading strategy.
Keywords: Reading Comprehension, Reading Maturity, Reading Strategy Use, Gender