The Effect of Text Familiarity and Reading Tasks on ESP Test Performances

In this study of the effects of text familiarity and task types on University students ’ English proficiency for specific purpose (ESP) test performance, 79 senior and junior university students majoring in Electronics and the same number majoring in English Translation took the IELTS General Training Reading Module as test of homogeneity. After classifying the participants based on the result gained on IELTS test, the target group took a sample reading comprehension test in Electronics module. This study showed that according to T-test analyses, students achieve significantly higher scores on reading tests in their own subject area than on reading tests outside it. This means degrees of text-familiarity serve as an advantage for participants taking a reading test. As a result, subjects who were majoring in Electronics did better than English ones in the final administration test which was an Electronics module reading text. In addition, one way ANOVA analysis revealed that in a comparison of different tasks, subjects ’ performance in sentence-completion task and writers ` view task were found to be significantly different from their performance of the other three tasks in question. They did better in other three tasks which were True-False, outling, and skimming. The implications of the study are discussed