THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE LOCATION OF THE TOPIC SENTENCE AND THE COMPREHENSION OF A PASSAGE BY IRANIAN ADVANCED EFL LEARNERS

The present article seeks to investigate the relationship between the location of the topic sentence (at the beginning, at the end) and the comprehension of a passage by Iranian advanced EFL learners. Administering version I of Cambridge first certificate test (1991), 60 students, both male and female, of advanced language proficiency were selected from among a total population of two hundred. Their age range was between 22-30. Afterwards, four advanced one-paragraph reading comprehension passages on general topics with topic sentences either at the beginning or at the end were assigned to them haphazardly. Half of the subjects (N=30) who had randomly received the passages with the topic sentences at the beginning were assigned to group A, and the other half (N=30) with the topic sentences at the end to group B. To find out whether the observed difference between the means of these two groups (A&B) on the reading tests was statistically significant, an independent t-test was run. From the obtained data, it could be concluded that the difference was not statistically significant at .05 level. As a result, it can be deduced that advanced learners comprehend reading passages to the same extent regardless of their topic sentence locations. This fact can be accounted for by the interactive compensatory model of reading comprehension proposed by Stanovich (1980).