Student major field and text content: interactive effects on reading comprehension in the Test of English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

It was hypothesized that a student's academic discipline would interact with the text content in determining performance on the reading passages of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). To test this hypothesis, the present study examined performance on the reading passages in TOEFL forms used in four operational test administrations. The results supported the hypothesis, as students in the two key major-field groups, the humanities/social sciences and the biological/physical sciences, performed better on passages related to their own groups than on other passages. The effect was significant for three of the four test forms. The effect was relatively small in each case, however, as expressed in terms of points on the TOEFL scale, perhaps because TOEFL reading passages are drawn from general readings rather than specialized text books. Thus, it is important to distinguish between the statistical significance and the practical significance of the effect.