The Effect of Content Familiarity on Reading Comprehension Performance of Iranian Secondary Students Learning EFL

This study investigated the relationship between learners’ prior experience with the subject material and their understanding of texts . It seemed that the content familiarity is a key factor in understanding and analyzing the messages included in texts . A group of thirty male students from a public high school in Sari, Iran took part in the study. The study sample was selected randomly. The participants were studying in grade 3, learning English as a foreign language. The method used in this study was experimental. The students were given six reading texts of two different types : familiar texts and unfamiliar texts . Once they were supposed to read the familiar texts and the other time the unfamiliar ones . They were to react to the texts given their schemata. The correlation coefficient was calculated for each text. The analyses indicated that content familiarity helped reading comprehension by tapping the students’ background knowledge . In fact , topic familiarity was found to have a facilitative effect on the mental representation of the reading texts. This paper discusses the potential value of learners’ prior knowledge of the content in interpreting message.

کلیدواژه ها:

content familiarity ، reading comprehension ، scripts ، background knowledge