Gender differences and EFL reading comprehension: Revisiting topic interest and test performance

This study investigated the relationship between topic interest and foreign language reading comprehension across gender groups. Participants were 106 intermediate EFL learners (54 males, 52 females) at a major language institute and 41 students at an Open University (20 males, 21 females). The participants in the former setting took two cloze tests and those in the latter sat two multiple choice tests. Each pair of tests included passages with a male-oriented and a female-oriented theme selected on the basis of the criteria developed by earlier item and text bias research (Bügel, 1993). In the former setting, no significant effect was found for topic interest with either test across gender groups. The same was the case for each group across the two tests. In the university setting, similar results were found with performance across groups, though gender groups had significantly different performance across tests. In contrast to previous findings with the same proficiency level in both ESL and EFL contexts, the findings suggest that topic interest might not be related to reading comprehension test performance vis-à-vis the targeted EFL settings providing support for recognizing variation in EFL contexts and accordingly encouraging caution with regard to generalizing research findings across such contexts.