on the relationship between inferential and referential test type:the case of efl learners

the purpose of this study was to investigate two different techniques for testing reading comprehension questions. differences are measured by two different types of questions including inferential and referential questions. to answer the referential questions, the reader is required to move beyond the level of sentence comprehension and understand the relationship among the sentences. while, inferential questions arc designed to check the students' ability to make logical conclusions, or inferences from the information provided in the text.400 senior students participated in the study. toefl (1991) was used as the main instrument in the study. 314 undergraduate english as a foreign language(efl)students whose scores were between one standard deviation (sd) below and above the mean were selected for the final analyses .the reading comprehension items were classified into referential (r) and inferential (i) questions and their related subcategories based on barrett's taxonomy ( 1968) by io ma teachers majonng 111 tefl. several statistical procedures (correlation coefficent, post-hoc cheffe's tests and factor analyses) were used to analyze the data. the results indicated that there was no significant difference between the means of referential and inferential reading comprehension questions and students' performance and they have the same underlying construct, but there was a significant difference between the mean scores of subjects in structure/vocabulary and referential/inferential questions. the finding will have some implications for curriculum developers, course material developers , language teachers and learners .in this research, different views towards teaching and testing reading comprehension, techniques and factors have been meticulously studied. then based on these features, some suggestions have been made for an effective reading comprehension classroom. this study suggests language tester to provide a better device to test subskills in reading comprehension.