Analysis of familiarity and interest in reading comprehension of Spanish students of English as a foreign language

This quantitative study compares the degree of influence of content familiarity and topic interest on the reading comprehension of 245 Spanish ESL students of 2 degrees and 4 degrees ESO. The comparison is made in general terms, and also by gender, L2 proficiency level, and assessment method (written recall and multiple choice). The data were collected during the 2nd and 3rd week of the second term of the school year 2013-2014 in two religious state-funded schools located in a northern Spanish town. The samples were analyzed by using Student's t-test and ANOVAs with the programme R. The results show that (a) the influence of familiarity outscores significantly that of interest; (b) as proficiency improves, the influence of both variables diminishes; (c) gender does not seem to affect reading comprehension of not gender-biased texts; and (d) the multiple choice task seems to help comprehension to a large extent.