Exploring the Effect of Text Type on EFL Readers at University Level: A Psycholinguistic Study with Pedagogical Implication

Abstract

Abstract The present study aims at doing a psycholinguistic study investigating the effect of text types on students' comprehension of English texts at university level and setting the pedagogical implications that help enhancing such a skill. The research deals with the problem of Iraqi EFL students who face lots of difficulties in performing reading comprehension (henceforth RC). This problematic aspect reflects the need to deep investigation of the students' efficient aptitudes in employing the cognitive-critical thinking skills to get higher level of RC and in differentiating between the types of the texts, in addition to other hidden factors on the part of the text itself that might increase the difficulty facing the students in their RC and need to be urgently highlighted. The sample of this study comprises 185 students of English at the 2nd stage, Department of English, College of Education for Human Sciences, University of Basra during the academic year 2015-2016. Two RC tests have been designed according to the cognitive domain of the Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (henceforth BRT) of the behavioural critical thinking levels .Then, the collected data of students' responses are analyzed by using the (SPSS,19.0). The results have shown that having the abilities of understanding, analyzing, applying, evaluating as well as creating altogether will assist students to achieve the highest level of performance in the RC of different text types in addition to other results of other studied factors are also presented in this study.