Impact of personality types (sensing vs. intuitive) and genre strructure on intermediate EFL learners reading comprehension performance

The aim of this study is to explore the effect of personality types and genre-based instruction among intermediate EFL learners on their reading comprehension. For this 160 students whose OPT score indicated their intermediate English language proficiency were selected. Before sampling Big five personality questionnaire was distributed among the subjects which resulted in their division into two major groups, namely sensing and intuitive. These groups were further divided into two more groups; hence these 4 groups were: (1) control/sensing, (2) experimental/sensing, (3) control/intuitive, (4) experimental/intuitive. Following a three-week instruction, a reading comprehension exam was administered. Students in experimental groups received genre-based instruction of reading comprehension while those in control groups were given a typical reading instruction. In the exam they were given three English research article abstracts organized according to Hyland s model and were asked to answer multiple-choice questions. The findings indicated that group (4) benefitted most from the instruction while there was not any significant difference between the performance of group (1) and group (2). The results have several implications for higher education institutes, teacher trainers, as well as ESP/EAP teachers.