The nature of reading comprehension as it relates to different cultural or language groups who speak English is an interesting topic not fully explored. The purpose of this study was to provide some psycholinguistic and statistical evidence regarding the reading abilities in English of native speakers compared to nonnative speakers of English. Reading skills believed to underlie reading comprehension were hypothesized to be important elements of a person's ability to perform a reading comprehension task (as measured by the cloze test). The hypothesized crucial reading skills were word meaning, decoding, anaphoric reference, and sentence syntax. / The general procedure of the study was to (a) develop a construct (model) of reading comprehension based on statistical analyses performed on the data resulting from the administration of tests of reading skills to native speakers of English and (b) assess the validity of that construct for nonnative students by comparing the reading performance of nonnative speakers with that of native speakers. In making the comparison, the following analyses were employed: path analysis, Hotelling's T-square, and discriminant analysis. / The data for native speakers came from a study by Roblyer (1978). The subjects consisted of 119 ninth grade students from two Leon County high schools. The additional data for this study were gathered from 100 ninth and tenth grade students in Luchetti high school in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The test scores from these native and nonnative speakers of English were compared. Results from path analysis indicated that for native speakers decoding, anaphoric reference, and sentence syntax had significant direct effects on reading comprehension (cloze test). However, for nonnative speakers, decoding and sentence syntax directly influenced reading comprehension, but anaphoric reference hardly had any effect. This difference was attributed to psycholinguistic factors. Hotelling's T-square revealed that there was a significant difference between the mean vectors of reading tests for the two groups and discriminant analysis revealed that the differences (discrimination) between the two groups could be attributed to differences in scores on tests of word meaning and decoding. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 44-06, Section: A, page: 1765. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1983.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75106 |
| Contributors | PADEN, PATRICIA ANN., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 194 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
Page generated in 0.0016 seconds