#41, Research Paper: ‘Correlating the Performance of ESL Students in Reading Comprehension Passages with Their Reading Habits’ by N.Pratheeba

Correlating the Performance of ESL Students in Reading Comprehension Passages with Their Reading Habits

by Dr.N.Pratheeba, Lecturer in English, Kamaraj College of Engineering and technology, Virudhunagar,Tamilnadu,India.

Abstrat

Tackling reading comprehension passages is an onerous task for any student. But reading comprehension passages are an essential part of any competitive examination, be it, IELTS, TOEFL, CAT, MAT, SAT etc. The ability of the student to solve any reading comprehension passages renders a great difference in the life of the student. For it is the deciding factor to get a seat in a coveted company or an esteemed institution.  Reading helps to widen the horizon of the knowledge of any student. Reading habits of students play a major role in enhancing the proficiency of the students in the target language. Time and again, it has been reported that the communicative competence of any student is directly proportional to the comprehensible output received by the student by means of his reading habit. Students who have a greater exposure to comprehensible input usually perform well in reading comprehension passages .To be more precise, strategies can be taught to the average student in the form of explicit instruction. This paper attempts to lay bare the fact that tackling reading comprehension passages has a direct relationship with the reading habit of the students.

KEYWORDS: reading comprehension, free voluntary reading, sustained silent reading, autonomous acquirers, free voluntary surfing, comprehensible input

1.     INTRODUCTION:

Tackling reading comprehension passages is an onerous task for any ESL student. But reading comprehension passages are an essential part of any competitive examination, be it, IELTS, TOEFL, CAT, MAT, SAT etc. The ability of an ESL student to solve any reading comprehension passages renders a great difference in the life of the student. For it’s the deciding factor to get a seat in a coveted company or an esteemed institution.  Reading helps to widen the horizon of the knowledge of any student. Reading habits of students play a major role in enhancing the proficiency of the students in the target language. Time and again, it has been reported that the communicative competence of any student is directly proportional to the comprehensible output received by the student by means of his reading habit.. The present research work is based on the hypothesis that autonomous acquirers of the target language who have greater exposure to comprehensible input by means of their reading habits perform better than the students who are devoid of such valuable comprehensible input. This paper attempts to lay bare the fact that tackling reading comprehension passages has a direct relationship with the reading habit of the students.

2. PROFICIENCY IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION:

Several studies in second language acquisition have confirmed that reading in the second language inevitably leads to a greater proficiency in the target language. Reading exercises in the form of SSR (sustained silent reading), USSR (unaided sustained silent reading) and FVR (free voluntary reading) naturally enhance the requisite skills to tackle reading comprehension passages.

Free voluntary reading , in one way or other helps to enhance vocabulary, reading comprehension, grammar, and writing not only among first language acquirers but also among second language acquirers.(ElleyandMangubhai,1983;Krashen,1993;Cho and Krashen,1994)Free voluntary reading is very useful in English as a foreign language situation where other sources of input may not be readily available.(Krashen,1997).However, most of the EFL students do not seem to take the advantage of the power of reading  that can help in a long way to boost their communicative competence. Cho and Krashen have also demonstrated how the narrow reading of easy, interesting reading material like the Sweet Valley Series helps to enrich the language competence of adult ESL acquirers.

3. LAYOUT OF SOLVING READING COMPREHENSION PASSAGES:

Tackling a reading comprehension Students must be able to identify the topic of the given passage. They must be able to distinguish the main ideas and supporting ideas of the given passage. They must vary their speed of their reading to find out the answer. They must be able to distinguish between real facts and opinions coined by the author. If the student is able to mind map the mindset of the author of the given passage, then definitely the student can perform excellently in the given exercise. Students must have a very good vocabulary for a complete comprehension of the given passage. It is hypothesed that tackling reading comprehension passages has a direct relationship with the reading habit of the ESL students.

4. METHOD: It is a well known fact that students who have a greater exposure to comprehensible input usually perform well in reading comprehension passages. The present research work is based on the hypothesis that autonomous acquirers of the target language who have greater exposure to comprehensible input by means of their reading habits perform better than the students who are devoid of such valuable comprehensible input.

4.1. PARTICIPANTS:

The proficiency of the ESL student in India is much diversified in the sense that some of them have access to the language right from their kindergarten. Some students learn English as their second language only from third grade. The medium of instruction for the other subjects in their school curricula is their mother tongue. Yet there is another batch of students who switch over to the medium of instruction in English from grade six though they have studied English as their second language from grade three. The researcher had chosen a heterogeneous pack of  thirty students coming from the above discussed backgrounds as the participants of the present study. The participants can be considered as advanced ESL learners as they have finished twelve years of schooling and enrolled themselves as first year engineering students. They are required to complete a paper entitled ‘Technical English’ in their first semester.

4.2QUESTIONAIRRE:  

                    A questionnaire bearing the following questions was distributed to the students under study and their reading habit was assessed. The score of the students was taken as 10 marks if they had ticked the Always box for a particular question. The score of the students was taken as 5 marks if they had ticked the Sometimes box for a particular question. The score of the students was taken as 3 marks if they had ticked the Never box for a particular question.

1) Do you read science fiction?

Always ? Sometimes ? Never ?

2) Do you read editorials in newspapers?

Always ? Sometimes ? Never ?

3) Are you in the habit of reading scientific journals?

Always ? Sometimes ? Never ?

 4) Do you read comics?

Always ? Sometimes ? Never ?

 5) Do you read short stories?

Always ? Sometimes ? Never ?

 6) Do you read historical novels?

Always ? Sometimes ? Never ?

7) Do you read didactic literature?

Always ? Sometimes ? Never ?

8) Do you read sports magazines?

Always ? Sometimes ? Never ?

9) Do you read film magazines?

Always ? Sometimes ? Never ?

10) Do you read any novels?

Always ? Sometimes ? Never ?

The maximum mark scored by the student in the above questionnaire was 83 and the minimum mark scored by one of the students was 30. So one can say that the class consists of a heterogeneous pack of readers who can be segregated into poor readers, average readers and good readers.

 4.3 Performance in reading comprehension passages:

The same set of students was asked to solve a series of reading comprehension passages of general interest. Every week, they were asked to solve one comprehension passage. The students under study were asked to solve five passages over a time period of five weeks. Since reading comprehension passages are the determinants of a person’s career, this study has correlated the performance of the students in solving reading comprehension passages with that of their reading habits. All the passages had the right mixture of inferential and referential questions which tested the reasoning ability of the concerned students. In addition to that, the students were asked to answer some objective type of questions that tested their overall level of comprehension. Every comprehension passage had questions totaling to 20 marks. The overall performance of the student was assessed by totaling their scores in all the five passages. Thus the total score in solving the given five comprehension passages to each student was 100 and the total marks scored by the students in solving the five reading comprehension passages was computed by adding the individual passage score. The total of the student’s score was taken into consideration and it was correlated with their corresponding score in the questionnaire.

4.5FINDINGS AND INFERENCES:

The objective of this research work is to develop a correlation analysis that would analyze the relationship between the two variables under consideration in order to predict or estimate the extent to which they are dependent upon one another. Though scatter diagrams, correlation graphs, Karl Pearson’s coefficient of correlation can be found out to determine the correlation between the variables the researcher has specifically computed Spearman’s rank correlation for the purpose of determining, if at all, there is a relationship between the reading habit of the ESL learners and their performance in reading comprehension passages. The ranks of the 30 students have been computed and the difference in the rankings has been computed. The marks gained by the students in the questionnaire have been converted to 100. The performance of the same students in five different reading comprehension passages had been added up to give a total score of 100. Each comprehension passage has been evaluated for 20 marks. The performance of the ESL learners in solving the five reading comprehension passages was ranked .In the same way, the corresponding marks of the student obtained in the questionnaire was also ranked. The difference in the ranks was found out and Spearman’s rank correlation was computed.

 To test whether the observed correlation coefficient was significant or not, the researcher has used t-test and calculated the test statistic with (n-2) degrees of freedom. The calculated value turned to be 1.9173.But the table value turned out to be 1.282 for the corresponding (n-2) degrees of freedom. As the calculated value is more than the table value, the researcher had rejected the null hypothesis at the given level of significance. This has lead the researcher to infer that there is relationship or correlation of statistical significance between the two variables(the marks scored by the students in the questionnaire under consideration and their collective performance in solving the five reading comprehension passages) under consideration as proposed by the alternative hypothesis.

 5. CONCLUSION:

From the above study, it is inferred that reading serves as the major driver for the academic level of achievement of students ;in this case, the performance of the students in tackling reading comprehension passages. A comparison of the marks of the students showed that the good ESL readers were able to photocopy the idea structure of the author into their minds. On the other hand, an average reader was able to travel half way through. And a bad reader was not able to fly up the rest. As the overall score of the students’  in  solving the five comprehension passages has been taken into correlation with their corresponding scores in the questionnaire that exposed their reading habits, it can very well be concluded that ,in general, the reading habit of the students affects considerably their performance in solving any reading comprehension passage

REFERENCES:

Cho,K.S.&Krashen,S.(1994).Acquisition of vocabulary from the Sweet Valley Kids Series:Adult ESL acquisition.Journal of reading,37,662-667.

Elley,W.&Mangubhai,R.(1983).The impact of reading on second language learning,Reading RESEARCH Quarterly,19,53-67.

Kim,H.&Krashen,S.(1997).Why don’t language acquirers take advantage of the power of reading?TESOL Journal,6(3),26-29.

Krashen,S.(1997).Foreign Language Education:The Easy Way,Culver City,CA:Language Associates.

Krashen,S.(1993).The Power of Reading:Insights from the research.Englewood:Libraries Unlimited.

Mrs.N.Pratheeba has done her M.A. in English from Annamalai University in the year 1995 and M.Phil in the year 2002 from Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai. She has been conferred with PhD degree in English in the month of December 2008 by Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, Tamilnadu, India. After serving as an English faculty for a brief period in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, she has worked in Sri Kaliswari College, Sivakasi as the HOD of English Department from the year 2000-2007. She has many publications in Journals and conferences to her credit. She has also published a book entitled “Technical English” for students of engineering colleges. At present, she is employed at Kamaraj College of Engineering and technology. Her area of interest is English Language Teaching.