Topic familiarity and text genres affecting the reading comprehension of first year college students

The present study aims to determine the significance and possible relation of topic familiarity and text genres that affect the reading comprehension of first year college students. Reading comprehension has been a main concern of educators these days because of various internal and external factors involving young readers. Setting aside the readers internal factors affecting their reading comprehension skills, it may be the duty of teachers to look into the topic and text genres of different reading materials employed to their students. A number of studies have been conducted on topic familiarity and text genres. Results of previous studies claim that prior knowledge of topic and text genres greatly affect the reading comprehension of students. The present study partly replicated the study of Romero et al (2005) and Best et al (2006) in conducting prior knowledge tests, as well as local and global comprehension tests, the latter, after various texts have been read by the participants. The result of the current study contradicts previously-drawn answers that topic and text genre have significance in the reading comprehension. The results suggest that with or without prior knowledge, and whether the text is narrative or expository, college students can easily understand the text