ABSTRACT

This paper presents a report of a survey which was designed to discover the extent to which reading ability is related to the experiential background in reading acquired by university undergraduates during their pre-university years and also while in the university. 115 subjects and 158 other subjects who had, based on their performances in reading tests, been designated "efficient" readers and "inefficient" readers respectively, were compared in the following respects: (a) Their access to a school or a public library, during their pre-university education(b) their extra-curricular or recreational reading (c) their reading of local and foreign newspapers; and (d) their reading of foreign journals and magazines as indicators of their relative experiential backgrounds in reading. Experiential background in reading was found to be highly correlated with reading ability for the following reasons: inefficiency in reading was significantly greater among those who had little or no access to a school or public library than among those who had more access; among those who indulged in little or no extra-curricular reading; among those who never or seldom read local newspapers, journals and magazines, than among those who did; and those who never read foreign newspapers than among those who read them occasionally. As for foreign journals and magazines, few of the efficient and inefficient subjects read them, and failure to read them did not appear to be significantly related to the reading abilities of the two groups. The findings of the survey established a good case for encouraging the development of a rich experiential background in reading among pupils at various educational levels and for providing adequate reading facilities for the purpose.