The topic sentence& reading comprehension in a foreign language : a case study

Abstract EN

Comprehension in a foreign language entails the learner’s ability to understand sentence propositions.

The higher level of proposition, the greater probability of it being recalled and comprehended.

This study is concerned with the extent that foreigner learners’ comprehension is affected by two factors: arrangement of sentences in the text and the presence or absence of the topic sentence (TS).

The study aims at measuring college students’ ability in comprehending expository paragraphs through a set of experiments in which (60) second-year and fourth-year students were assigned a recognition task and a production task to reveal their comprehension.

The results indicate that these students performed better with the presence of TS although the fourth-year students outperformed the second-year students in this respect.

However, both groups rated low in the production task in comparison with the first task but with the exception of the fourth-year group again achieving better than the junior group and this might be attributed to the fact that the senior group are more acquainted with the language than the junior group.