Effect Of Topic Familiarity And Unknown Word Rate On Senior High School Students’ Reading Performance

In past few decades, a great many studies have investigated the processes of EFL reading comprehension from the perspective of background knowledge or unknown words and produced quite a few outcomes. Among many factors which influence reading comprehension,background knowledge is a key factor presented in these studies. It is also acknowledged that unknown words rate is also a significant factor influencing reading comprehension in quite a few researches. However, studies about the influence of combining topic familiarity with unknown word rate on students’ reading performance can scantily be found in the literature.Therefore, this study aims to survey the effects of topic familiarity and unknown word rate on EFL reading comprehension.In this study, three research questions are put forward:(1) Does the topic familiarity influence EFL students’ reading comprehension? If so, to what extent?(2) Does the unknown word rate affect students’ reading comprehension? If so, to what extent?(3) Among the two schematic variables, is there any interaction between topic familiarity and unknown word rate?In order to give answers to these three questions, an empirical research is conducted on senior high school students’ reading performance in familiar and unfamiliar passages with different unknown words rate. One questionnaire and testing materials attached to reading passages are designed and conducted to examine student’s reading comprehension.This study firstly applied reliability analysis to test the reliability of familiarity questionnaire and testing paper after data collection. Descriptive analysis is used to show the general results of data, Paired Samples T-test as well as GLM-Univariate(MANOVA) is used to answer the research questions.The results of the investigation provide evidence to answer the three questions. They testify that topic familiarity and unknown words rate are two important factors which influences reading comprehension. The results indicate that the effect of topic familiarity is significant and it has a great influence on students’ reading comprehension by stimulating the preexisting schema of prior knowledge. In addition, the influence of unknown word rate on reading comprehension is also very significant. Last but not least, there also exists an interactive effect between topic familiarity and unknown word rate. The results of the research show that topic familiarity will be helpful for students’ comprehension of the reading material.Student are more familiar with the topic, they will better comprehend the passage. Similarly,the fewer unknown words in the article, the better comprehension the students will have.At the end of the investigation, some pedagogical suggestions are put forward. In choosing reading materials, teacher should keep the balance of familiar and unfamiliar passages, and students also need to accumulate more topic knowledge and know more commonsense in daily life. Teacher also should pay attention to vocabulary teaching to promote students’ vocabulary amount, so as to reduce the barrier in reading comprehension.