The Effect of Gender Base Materials on Reading Comprehension

Abstract

As it is true for other three language skills, reading is a process involving the activation of relevant knowledge and related language skills to accomplish an exchange of information from one person to another .Reading requires that the reader focus attention on the reading materials and integrate previously acquired knowledge and skills to comprehend what someone else has written. There have been a lot of researches on reading and reading comprehension. One of the most interesting areas in reading comprehension is related to schemata theory. This interesting line of research in the second language area concerns the effect on reading performance of readers' own internalized models or emotions and beliefs, consequently different internalized models or schemata, males will have greater comprehension achievement if they read the text which sound masculine and females will have greater comprehension achievement provided that they read text which are about feminine topics.

Having a look at the revised pre-university English course book, we can truly recognize that nearly all of the text in this book with the topics such as sports and exercise (with a picture of man in running), global warming and man and space (with a picture of man in the space) are male oriented .Based on the result of previous researches on reading comprehension, this paper suggests:

• Including balance of reading material ,one half male oriented and one half female oriented;
• including topics such as space ,war ,competition ,sports for males ;
• including topics such as house chores ,humanities and baby sittings for females in high school levels of English course book;

That both male and female have the equal chance to activate their pre-existent knowledge to comprehend the text.