Content Familiarity and Gender Neutral Texts in Foreign Language Reading Comprehension

Since the main goal of EFL students in countries where English is taught as a foreign language, is reading, focusing on the ways to improve the students’ reading comprehension is inevitable. Based on the schema theory, it has been found that the background knowledge of males and females differs. This difference in background knowledge can affect the students’ reading comprehension. In Iran, although boys and girls study in different schools, they follow the same curricula and syllabuses in all schools. The present article reports the results of a study investigating the interaction between content familiarity and gender on two neutral texts. To this end, data were elicited from 123 high school students (86 = female and 37 = male) ranging from 16-18 years old. They were randomly assigned to four groups and were presented with four. Two of the texts were familiar to the subjects and the other two texts were unfamiliar to them. The subjects’ reading comprehension was assessed through two different testing measures: recall protocol and cloze test. Using a between-subjects design and a two-way MANOVA test, the performance of the four groups was compared. Results indicated that there was a two-way interaction effect between familiarity and gender. Females scored higher on familiar text whereas males outperformed on unfamiliar text. Based on the obtained results, gender differences contribute to students’ performance in reading comprehension.