Sex Differences in Foreign Language Text Comprehension: The Role of Interests and Prior Knowledge

Abstract

The scores obtained by female students on the national foreign language examinations in the Netherlands have been slightly but consistently lower than those of male students. The present research among 2980 high school students tested the hypothesis that, owing to sex differences in prior knowledge and interests, the topic of a text is an important factor explaining these sex‐based differences. To measure prior knowledge, the students' reading and TV habits, academic subject choice, self‐reported knowledge, and interest concerning the text topics were assessed. A total of 11 different English reading passages—including 5 texts with a “male” topic, and 6 texts with a “female” topic—were selected. On all the male reading comprehension measures, and on five of the six female tests, significant differences were found in the expected direction. Moreover, these sex‐based differences appeared to be largely due to sex differences in reading habits. Although there was only an indirect relation between the students' reading preference and the text comprehension score on related topics, this study suggests that differences between the sexes in prior knowledge contribute to sex differences in foreign language reading comprehension.

The Effect of Pre-reading Discussions on Word-guessing Ability of Iranian Pre-intermediate Freshmen University Students

“…Eskey (1988) believes that new information, new concepts, and new ideas can have meaning when they can be related to something the individual already knows. However, the results reported above are not consistent with the arguments previously made for using pre-reading activities such as pre-reading discussions (e.g., Bügel & Buunk, 1996 In the literature, there is a combination of factors that influence L2 readers" lexical inferencing; these include textrelated and reader-related variables a combination of which affects lexical inferencing (Kaivanpanah and Alavi 2008). This study tried to examine the effect of a single variable i.e.…”

Post-adjunct Reading Comprehension Questions and Meaning Construction: A Case of Gender Study

“…Genderrelated characteristics of the texts have been confirmed to account for the superiority or inferiority of one sex to the other in some of these studies (e.g. Scott, 1986;Bügel & Buunk, 1996;Brantmeier, 2003;Phakiti, 2003& Pae, 2004. The contribution of text type and topic to such gender-related studies can be viewed psychologically and culturally.…”

“…Bügel & Buunk, 1996;Brantmeier, 2004). In these studies, patterns of preference (text topic preferences) are reflected in the readers" performance on the tests of reading comprehension.…”

“…Bacon, 1992;Bügel & Buunk, 1996;Brantmeier, 2003). In Bügel and Buunk (1996) males reported that they read articles and magazines about specialized topics. For example, the greater experience with linguistically complex texts was discussed to lead in males" superiority in reading comprehension in the above study.…”

Pictorial, Textual, and Picto-Textual Glosses in E-Reading: A Comparative Study

“…Furthermore, the subjects of this study comprised mixed groups of male and female participants. Gender-oriented studies on reading comprehension have yielded contradictory results; some have favored males and others have favored females (Bügel & Buunk, 1996;Myers, 2002;Brantmeier, 2003;Pae, 2004). No research has yet explored the likely effects of gender differences on variations in subjects' performance on learning through glosses in multimedia environments.…”