The Effects of Text Length and Question Type on the Reading Comprehension Test Performance of Korean EFL Readers

Abstract

The factors affecting English as a foreign language (EFL) learners reading comprehension have brought up much controversy. Among such factors, the literature on the contribution of text input, especially text length to reading performance, however, is quite limited in offering convincing evidence. Therefore, the present study examines the text input, especially, the influence of text length on Korean EFL readers text comprehension and their perception focusing on their inference generation process and their use of strategy depending on the two different reading contexts: short or long passages. A total of 202 Korean EFL learners participated in the present study

100 of them were college students and 102 were high school freshmen and sophomores. Half of each group took a reading comprehension test consisting of 4 passages (2 short and 2 long) from the CSAT (College Scholastic Ability Test) and half took the other test format consisting of 4 passages (2 long and 2 short), as well. The long version of the test was made from its original restored version in which one or two paragraphs were added to the truncated one. The analysis of the data was then conducted through running a paired samples t-test and a repeated measure two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results show that the influence of text length on readers performance, question types (multiple-choice and open-ended inference generation questions) is significant. Moreover, it was proved that both college and high school students performed significantly better on open-ended questions which required an inference generation process when the longer texts were given to the test-takers. Besides the main effects, a significant interaction effect between text length and question type was shown for the college students of higher proficiency level of English. On the other hand, in terms of their perception of the two different reading passages, the results of the college and high school readers were not consistent. The college students perceived that their reading comprehension benefited from the long passages rather than the short ones. However, for the high school students, they seemed to prefer the short passages over the long ones, but the difference was marginal and did not have any statistical significance. In addition, the participants responses in stimulated recall interviews revealed some critical information to indicate that the longer text can better assist the EFL readers comprehension process. All things considered, these findings have implications for reading comprehension test developers when it comes to deciding on which reading passages to use while setting up to reading comprehension tests, especially if they are high-stake nationwide public examinations, such as the CSAT. Moreover, they shed more light on the importance of the selected factors which can result in better performance of EFL readers.