South African financial reporting students' reading comprehension of the IASB Conceptual Framework

Differences in students’ reading comprehension of international financial reporting standards: a South African case

“…In exploring demographic differences in financial reporting students' reading comprehension, this study replicated the use of the Cloze procedure adopted by Janse van Rensburg et al (2014). The Cloze procedure was applied to two asset-related standards IAS 2, Inventories (IAS 2) (IASB, 2003b) and IAS 16, Property, Plant and Equipment (IAS 16) (IASB, 2003c).…”

“…Evidence of a high co-variance between the scoring of maze and open-ended Cloze has been provided (Williams et al, 2011). In accounting literature, openended Cloze appears to be favoured (Bargate, 2012;Cornachione, 2004;Janse van Rensburg et al, 2014;Stevens et al, 1993). Benchmark comprehension levels for the Cloze procedure were established by Bormuth (1968Bormuth ( , 1969 and Rankin and Culhane (1969) (Table 1).…”

“…Reading comprehension is often evaluated using the Cloze procedure (Bormuth, 1968;Taylor, 1953Taylor, , 1956Taylor, , 1957 across a variety of texts, for example, accounting textbooks (Bargate, 2012;Cornachione, 2004;Raabe et al, 1984;, authoritative accounting pronouncements (Adelberg & Razek, 1984;Stevens et al, 1983) and a conceptual framework of accounting (Janse van Rensburg et al, 2014). The interaction between the language competence and prior knowledge of a reader and the authors' intended communication forms the foundation of the Cloze procedure (Bormuth, 1966).…”

“…Evidence has, however, been presented to contest this (Gellert & Elbro, 2013;Tabatabaei & Mirzaei, 2014). Despite the criticism, the Cloze procedure provides instructors with a 'very teacher-friendly' (Chatel, 2001, p. 3) and 'very helpful' indication of their students' general reading proficiency (Hadley & Naaykens, 1999, p. 64;Klapwijk, 2013) and allows for the exploration of demographic differences in students' reading comprehension (Janse van Rensburg et al, 2014). Diagnostically, the Cloze procedure can effectively determine how students extract the meaning of the text from the context of a sentence or paragraph.…”

“…To explore these differences, this paper expands on that of Janse van Rensburg et al (2014) through performing a differentiated replication 2 of their study of South African financial reporting students' reading comprehension of the Framework. The diversity of students in South Africa provides the opportunity for such exploration.…”