The Role of Gender and Strategy Use in Processing Authentic Written Input at the Intermediate Level

Abstract

At the university, the reading of lengthy, authentic second language (L2) literary texts generally begins at the intermediate level of Spanish language instruction; however, most strategy use research is conducted with participants from the basic stages of language acquisition. The present study was undertaken with fifth semester students of Spanish in order to examine the interaction effects of readers' gender and passage content with L2 readers' strategy use, and to further explore whether global or local strategies relate to comprehension. After reading two different passages taken from a short story about boxing by Cortazar and a short story about a frustrated housewife by Poniatowska, participants completed comprehension tasks and a strategy use questionnaire. Previous investigations suggested that more successful readers use global reading strategies to process a text, but much of this research did not correlate strategy use with comprehension of texts utilized in the study. Although findings of the present study indicated that men use more global strategies than women when faced with the Cortazar passage, results revealed that global and local strategy use did not significantly correlate with performance on comprehension tasks. Type of strategy use did not predict comprehension at this level of instruction.