THE ROLE OF GIVEN INFORMATION ON THE SPEED OF THE COMPREHENSION OF CONTEXT AND NON-CONTEXT BASED INFORMATION IN EFL LEARNERS

The significance of comprehension in the process of second language learning / acquisition seems to be admitted in almost all current theories. The present research studies the impact of given informat ion on comprehension, suggesting its important role in sentence understanding. In order to achieve this goal, a group of 80 Persian-speaking university learners of English (as a foreign language) were selected. „Direct Antecedent ‟ pairs sentences and „Indirect Antecedent ‟ pairs sentences were used in two lists, each containing 20 sentences- 10 Direct and 10 Indirect Antecedent pairs. The subjects were divided randomly into two groups of 40. Each group was presented with one list. For presenting the sentences, a computer program was used. In order to investigate the effect of each presentation, through using the computer, we measured the taken time for comprehending the pairs. The analysis of data suggests that the presence of given information has a powerful effect on subjects‟ faster comprehension of new information