Abstract
The objective of this study was to investigate adolescents' reading practices and the relationship with their reading comprehension performance. One hundred twenty-one 5th-7th graders from public middle schools, both male and female and aged from 11 to 14 years old, participated in this study. Three instruments were applied : a Cloze reading comprehension questionnaire; a Cloze reading practice test; and a Home Literacy questionnaire. The main results showed that most students read one or more books per year and use social networking sites for discussions frequently. As for the association between reading practices and reading comprehension, the results showed that reading for enjoyment, for example, reading comic books and manga, is related to low reading comprehension performance since the students that read more of this type of text had lower performance according to the results of Analysis of Variance (F(3, 120) = 2.91; p = 0.03). In addition, it was found that students who read more school-related texts at home had better performance on reading comprehension tests (F(3, 120) = 2.92; p = 0.03).
Keywords:
Comprehension; Reading habits; Reading.
