92
with the rise of cotton as the most important American export product in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whereas the second passage discussed the early
people and cultures of the United States
.
Each test included ten multiple-choice
questions aimed at assessing the students’ overall understanding of the text and some
words and structures
.
Each question was assigned one mark and the total score for
each test was 10 marks
.
Text readability statistics were produced for both passages employed in the
study to ensure they were identical in length and difficulty and to determine whether
their reading level suited the proficiency level
of the subjects of the study
.
The Microsoft Word readability add-on automatically generated reports to
determine the reading level of the texts based on five common readability formulas
along with the
familiarity formula
.
Whereas the five readability measures all use word
length to measure word difficulty, the
‘familiarity measure’ uses word frequency
information to determine word difficulty based on the British National Corpus
.
For
each measure, the text is then rated as either
‘Simple’,
‘Easy’,
‘Good’,
‘Challenging’
or
‘Difficult’
.
The different grades from each measure help give a more reliable
assessment of the text difficulty (“Readability Plugin,”2011)
.
Figures 6 and 7 on next
page represent the readability statistics reports for PD and CD reading texts
respectively
.
93
Figure 6
.
Readability statistics for PD condition
text used in the study
Figure 7
.
Readability statistics for CD condition text used in the study
94
Overall, both passages seem to be comparable in form-Word count
:
363/365;
Sentence count
:
17/18; Syllable count
:
601/620
.
As for readability tests, relevant
measures are
Flesch Reading Ease and
Flesch Kincaid Grade Level
.
Flesch (as cited
in Al-Otaibi, 2011, p
.
53) mentioned that “higher scores on the Reading Ease test
indicate that the passages are easier to read than those with lower scores”; the higher
the value, the more readable the text
.
The Flesch Kincaid Grade Level transforms the
Flesch Reading Ease score to a United States school grade, which means that the text
can be read and understood by an average student in
that grade
.
As shown in figures 3 and 4, the selected PD and CD reading passages had
Reading Ease values of 45
.
09 and 42
.
55 respectively, which makes them identical in
difficulty and suitable to students at grade 12 who completed a four-year high school
program and are in their freshman year at university
.
As a rule, texts with a Flesch
Reading Ease score of 0-30 are best understood by university graduates who
completed a four-year program
.
Considering the differences between the American
and Algerian school systems, and the fact that the subjects who took part in the study
were non-native speakers of English and still had to study for one more year to
graduate, the selected passages were deemed to be of an average difficulty and
suitable to the subjects’ level
.
95
4
.
3
.
2
.
Vocabulary Tests
The vocabulary tests were adapted from the “501 Vocabulary Questions” book
published by LearningExpress (2003)
.
The aim of the book is to measure students’
knowledge of words generally encountered in textbooks, newspapers and magazines,
and especially in standardized tests like the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) or the
GRE (Graduate Records Examinations)
.
This book was chosen for its high
practicality in assessing L2 learners’ vocabulary
.
4
.
3
.
2
.
1
.
Pretest
The vocabulary pretest required supplying definitions for ten supposedly
unknown words in ten sentences (See Appendix G)
.
The words were printed in bold
face and were considered to unlikely be known to a fair proportion of the students, in
view of
their level
.
4
.
3
.
2
.
2 Posttest
The vocabulary posttest was divided into two parts (5 target words each)
:
The
first part was a “multiple-choice” test in which the words were given with a very little
contextual support
.
There were four choices per item
:
one key (correct answer) and
three distractors (options other than the correct answer)
.
Each item of the test required
picking the appropriate word
.
The second part was a “fill in the blank” test in which