Chapter 8: Gender and Foreign Language Reading Comprehension: The Effects of Strategy Training

Over the past few decades, the study of learner variables in foreign- and second-language learning has emerged as a way to investigate how and why language learners vary in their acquisition of the target language. Results from such studies point toward several individual factors that play a role in foreign-language (FL) learning, including age, aptitude, motivation, learning strategies, learning styles, anxiety, personality, and gender. The interaction between gender and FL reading comprehension has received more interest recently as researchers have examined the relationship between gender and various nonlinguistic factors. The present study examines the effects of strategic training on reading comprehension by gender. More specifically, it analyzes the efficacy of pre-reading strategy training in either conceptually driven top-down strategies or text-bound bottom-up strategies. Results show that subjects in the top-down treatment group outperform subjects who received bottom-up or no training, that females outperform males on nearly all assessment measures, and that males were less homogeneous as a group than were the females.