| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 英美語文學系 === 106 === This research aims to investigate how gender-oriented texts impact adolescents’ reading comprehension. A case study of qualitative research is adopted for this research. One female and one male junior high student, both thirteen years of age, participated in the research. The researcher collected data through triangulation, the think aloud method, semi-structured oral interviews and the researcher’s own reflective notes. With think aloud methods, both of the participants read two gender-oriented texts consisting of a female-oriented and a male-oriented text, and three gender-neutral texts. Four levels of reading comprehension adopted from Many and Cox (1992, p. 56) were applied for the data analysis.
Three research questions of this research are: (1) How do female-oriented texts impact adolescents’ reading comprehension? (2) How do male-oriented texts impact adolescents’ reading comprehension? (3) How do gender-neutral texts impact adolescents’ reading comprehension? The findings indicated that content familiarity influences EFL reading comprehension. Different reading comprehension levels of male and female students were associated with their differences in prior knowledge. The female student had the highest comprehension level on the female-oriented reading text while the male student had the highest comprehension level on male-oriented reading text.
The researcher also hopes that second language instructors, editors, the government and related organizations will heed the findings of this study when they select reading materials for learners and when they design second language proficiency tests.
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