Second language reading topic familiarity and test score: test-taking strategies for multiple-choice comprehension questions

The main purpose of this study was to compare the strategies used by Chinesespeaking students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in a multiplechoice format reading comprehension test. The focus was on describing what students do when they are taking reading comprehension tests by asking students to verbalize their thoughts. The strategies were further compared with participants’ level of familiarity with different reading topics and their reading scores. Twenty Chinese-speaking participants at the University of Iowa performed three tasks: a topical knowledge vocabulary assessment that served as an indicator of each participant’s topical knowledge about the four selected content areas in this study (law, business, language teaching, and engineering); two Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) internet-based test (iBT) practice reading comprehension passages, one with a familiar topic and the other with an unfamiliar topic, and both with retrospective think-aloud protocols; and an interview related to participants’ test-taking strategies. Two stages of analysis, qualitative and quantitative, were undertaken in this study. For the qualitative analysis, all verbal reports provided by participants in the think-aloud protocols and the interviews were recorded and transcribed. Six categories of strategies emerged: general approaches to reading the passages, identification of important information by the discourse structure of the passages, vocabulary/sentence-in-context approaches, multiple-choice test-management strategies, test-wiseness, and background knowledge. For the quantitative analysis, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures was completed to determine if there were significant differences based on the frequency of strategy use and level of topic familiarity. The results showed that the types of test-taking strategies adopted by Chinese-speaking graduate students remained similar when they read passages with familiar versus unfamiliar topics. However, participants all