LANGUAGE IN INDIA

The Performance of Male and Female Students of First Year Engineering in Reading Comprehension Tests

S. Sankarakumar, S. Chandrakanthi, Ph.D. and P. Malathy, Ph.D.

Abstract

This research study was designed to assess the performance of male and female students on a reading test with regard to demands on the strategy use and the interaction of the text topic with gender in a formal testing environment. The participants were 140 (90 - male and 50 - female) first year students in the 17 – 19 age range studying Engineering at PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, South India.

After 20 hours instruction in reading skills during their course work “Communication Skills in English”, the reading test was administered to the participants. The test material consists of two passages, both dealing with topics without gender bias. The questions based on these two passages were classified into three categories: Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ), Identifying True or False Statements (T/F), and Matching the Vocabulary (MV). The demanding nature of each question enabled the students to interact with the reading text using different strategies. The findings of the study suggest that males and females perform differently on different items. Significant differences in their performance on “Multiple Choice Questions” and “True or False Statements (T/F) were found for both the passages. Conversely, there were no significant differences in their performance on “Matching the Vocabulary items (MV)” for both the passages. Further, the text topics, which were not gender-biased, did not have an effect on the performance. Nonetheless, the overall performance of male and female students of first year graduate engineers on the reading comprehension tests were significantly different, implying that the text topic did not influence the performance on the reading comprehension test. This research paper discusses the findings and suggests suitable classroom implications.

Keywords: Reading Comprehension, Reading strategies, Topic Familiarity, Reading Test Item type, Classroom instruction

Introduction

Assessing reading skills is steadily resuming into the status of a conundrum due to the pedagogical restrictions and implementation strategies imposed upon students. Reading ability is an important skill that enables the students to understand the nuances of the text and construct meaning by using the available resources from the text and from their past knowledge. These resources help the readers use lexis and syntax, recall the meanings from one’s mental lexicon, make inferences, and employ schemata appropriately to the successful comprehension of the text (Donin et al, 2004; Fukkink et al, 2005). The students’ level of mastery in text comprehension can be assessed by different measures. Some reading test items are multiple choice questions (MCQ), open-ended question, cloze (C-Test), true/false/not given (T/F/NG), fill-in-the-blanks, written recall, sentence completion, and matching the vocabulary activity (MV). These question-types can measure readers’ ability to identify the main idea or topic sentence, guess meaning from the context, read for specific information, identify referential meaning, the tone of the reading passage, and make inferences, and the gist of the reading, write summaries, and many more. Based on the ability measured in each question, the reader adopts a special approach -- top-down, bottom-up, or both and Interactive approach. In other words, it is the test item that demands a reader to employ certain strategies in answering reading comprehension questions. For example, Anderson et al (1991) found that the test items affect examinees’ responses and their interaction with the text. Some items require test-takers to reread parts of the passage, to process deep level comprehension, or to scan; while other test items merely need a surface level understanding of the passage. Test conditions also influence the way readers interact with the test. Phakiti (2003) stated that “in a high-stakes test situation” (p.656), learners may use different strategies from normal reading conditions and some strategies are specifically used in test-taking contexts.

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S. Sankarakumar
Research Scholar (PT)
Asst. Professor (Sr.Gr)
Department of English
PSG College of Technology
Coimbatore – 641004
Tamilnadu
India
sankareng@gmail.com

S.Chandrakanthi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor & Head (Retd.)
Department of English
PSG College of Technology
Coimbatore – 641 004
Tamilnadu
India
chandras214@yahoo.co.in

P. Malathy, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor (Sr.Gr.)
Department of Science and Humanities (English)
Kumaraguru College of Technology
Coimbatore – 641 049
Tamilnadu
India
visitmala@yahoo.com

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