The Effect of Topic Sentence Location on Reading Comprehension Performance of Iranian Advanced EFL Learners

The present article seeks to investigate the effect of topic sentence location (at the beginning, at the end) on the reading comprehension of advanced EFL learners. Administering Version I of Cambridge First Certificate Test (1991), 60 students, both males and females, of advanced language proficiency were selected from among a total population of two hundred. Their age range was between 22-30. Afterwards, four advanced one-paragraph reading comprehension passages on general topics with topic sentences either at the beginning or at the end were assigned to them haphazardly. Half of the subjects (N = 30) who had randomly received the passages with the topic sentences at the beginning were assigned to group A, and the other half (N = 30) with the topic sentences at the end to gronp B. To find out whether the observed difference between the means of these two gronps (A & B) on the reading tests was statistically significant, an independent sample t-test was run. From the obtained data, it could be concluded that the difference was not statistically significant. As a result, it can be deduced that advanced learners comprehend reading passages to the same extent regardless of their topic sentence locations. This fact can be accounted for by the “interactive compensatory model of reading comprehension” proposed by Stanovich (1980)