ESL Reading Strategies: Differences in Arabic and Mandarin Speaker Test Performance

This study was undertaken to test the hypothesis that reading comprehension items, which elicit specific bottom‐up and top‐down strategies, favor certain linguistic/cultural groups. Verbal report data were collected from Arabic‐ and Mandarin‐speaking English as a second language (ESL) learners to identify the reading strategies involved in carrying out 32 reading questions. Then a confirmatory approach to differential item functioning was used to determine whether bottom‐up and top‐down items functioned differentially for equal‐ability Arabic and Mandarin ESL learners. Results revealed systematic group performance differences in four bottom‐up and three top‐down strategy categories. Items involving breaking a word into smaller parts, scanning, paraphrasing, and matching were found to favor Mandarin speakers, whereas items involving skimming, connecting, and inferring were found to favor Arabic speakers.