The Role of Ethnicity in Integrative Tests Performances of Male/ Female Iranian English Learners of Different Language Proficiency Levels

Abstract

Linguistic/cultural differences of learners' native language with English as a foreign language, gender and English proficiency level are among those numerous variables which affect English learning and its quality in Iranian context. The present study was an attempt to illuminate the effects of these variables on performing integrative approach of general English tests (cloze test and recall task, in particular). Hence, participants who were 162 Persian/Arab English learners (students of Abadan Institute of Technology in Khozestan, a province in which Arabic and Persian ethnicities live together) of both genders and were at different levels of proficiency were categorized into two categories of 82 Persian and 80 Arab English learners, as the basic categories of the study. Then, subjects were exposed to the study's instruments:clozed and recall tasks made out of culture-based texts. The obtained results of an independent samples t-tests implied that Persian English learners performed remarkably better than their Arab peers. This over-performance may be because of linguistic/cultural characteristics of Persian which is more analogous with English (structurally and phonologically speaking) compared with Arabic. With the aid of a three-way ANOVA, gender and language proficiency level were also found to be effective variables for successful performance of integrative tests. In better words, as students' proficiency level decreases, cultural parameters play more significant roles in their recall task performances. It was also found that, subjects' performances on cloze and recall tasks as two manifestations of integrative tests were highly correlated.