Reading comprehension of non-native students in English composition at the freshman level

Abstract

Five reading comprehension instruments were administered to groups of native and non-native students enrolled in Freshman English at Texas A&M University in an attempt to discover how well these upper-level, post-institute English as a Second Language readers perform in comparison with their native counterparts. Two traditional, two integrative, and one subjective measure were employed, and altogether there were 316 subject responses. While the "Diederich Reading Test" did not discriminate between native and non-native freshmen, the other four instruments -- the Davis Reading Test, the timed cloze test, the sequenced and scrambled cloze exercise, and the subjective instrument -- showed consideration differentiation between the two groups of students. The results found at TAMU were compared with those found earlier in studies at UCLA, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Michigan. The findings at TAMU suggested that, relative to native freshmen, non-native freshmen experience problems with discourse, rate, and vocabulary as they decode English messages. Though the experiment at TAMU was not without limitations, practical implications were derived from the study, addressing the issues of placement, instruction, assignments, and materials appropriate for non-native freshmen.