Investigating the Reading Performance of Kurdish Learners of ESL by Using Stroop Test

Stroop test has not been used to examine the reading performance of Kurdish speakers of English as a second language. Therefore, the aim of this study is to use English and Kurdish Stroop tasks to investigate the reading performance of Kurdish Learners of ESL. The six males and three females who participated in this research represent the sample of the study. They read and name Stroop stimuli in each of the six tasks which were divided into two parts; three Kurdish tasks and three English ones. The results of the difference of time and the scores of the Stroop effect show that the time to complete the English tasks was longer than that of the Kurdish tasks, but the Stroop effect is almost equal in both Kurdish and English conditions. Moreover, the overall dominance of Kurdish language affects and facilitates the processing of the Kurdish Stroop tasks. The high reading performance of the participants is also noted and this indicates the suitability of English and Kurdish Stroop tests with Kurdish speakers of English. Article Info Received: January, 2020 Revised: February, 2020 Accepted: April, 2020 s


Introduction
Reading skill is an essential skill in learning second language. The contexts of second language learning are the ones in which the target language of the classroom is already available outside the class (Brown & Lee, 2015). The tasks of reading can be done automatically or intentionally. Harley (2001, p. 162) points out that reading is basically a mandatory process; meaning that readers feel obliged to read a word once they see it. He supports this introspection by reporting evidence from the Stroop task: "naming the colour in which a word is written is made more difficult if the colour name and the word conflict (e.g. "red" written in green ink)". During the reading process, it is required to make sense of the word by recognising the words as a language data as well as the concept. This sometimes becomes harder as a result of some factors such as lexical frequency, word length, dissimilarities of languages, and language transfer.

The Stroop task was originally devised by John
Ridley Stroop (1935) who studied educational psychology. The test has been used in many related, Journal of the University of Garmian 7 (2), 2020 Page 265 but different areas of psychology, and developed or modified by researchers around the world. It has also been employed to better understand the reading ability by examining the performance of test takers.
During the test, stroop test takers generally are presented with three cards. Two of them contain words, and each word is a name of a colour. In one of these, the words are written in black ink (W) whereas in the other, words are printed in a colour which does not represent the colour (CW). The third card has equal number of items printed in coloured ink (C) as the other cards (Golden, 1978). Furthermore, the reading performance of each individual is observed with each card, and then compared together so as to measure the time and correct scores that is called Stroop interference effect or Stroop effect. Bilinguals, people who are able to use two languages for communication (Procter, 2008), who have performed Stroop tasks encounter the problem of suppressing one language system so as to respond to the item in the target language. Bialystok, Craik, and Luk (2008) report that it is difficult for people who are proficient in two languages to access their lexicon because both languages are active during language production. Therefore, such bilinguals read in the second language with less automaticity. As a result, the performance of reading takes longer in involving two languages, the similarity between the two impacts the entire process of reading and naming the Stroop items. Fang, Tzeng, and Alva (1981) affirm the effect of orthographic variation on the performance of the participants in their Stroop study in which four nationalities took part. The spelling system of languages entails mechanisms that limit or accelerate the information processing system. Moreover, the difference between two languages, for example German and Swedish which are graphemically similar to a degree, and English and Chinese which are not, has to be taken into consideration because this influences Stroop interference effect to various extents (Chen & Ho, 1986

Materials
A version of the Stroop test was developed to fit the research aim of this paper based on Golden"s (1978) Stroop Colour and Word Test. Instead of using cards, computer power points were used, and three slides for each language version, Kurdish and English were created. The first slide (W) has sixteen words printed in black ink, and the second slide (C) contains the same number of items printed in coloured ink and in rectangulars. The third slide (CW) has the same number of words that are printed in coloured ink which is different from the words which represent the selected colours. Therefore, the total number of slides is six.

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The Times New Roman is used to type the English colour words because it is a common and clear font. Then, Kurdish Keyboard is installed in order to type the Kurdish words because the Kurdish font is not originally available in Microsoft Office programs and this keyboard is also commonly used in Iraqi Kurdistan region where the participants belong.
The chosen font size is forty.
There has not been consensus on how many colour words should be taken into account. After reading several articles; therefore, four colours have been selected for the test. These are red, green, blue, and yellow. The number of syllables in the Kurdish and English words is equal except for yellow which is two syllables.

Procedure and Data Analysis
The two parts of the test were administered separately. The necessary instructions were given to the participants in their mother tongue which is Kurdish. The Kurdish part of the test was conducted first, and then followed by the English one.
Each slide was reported treated independently; moreover, the focus was on to two main points.
Firstly, how long it may take each participant to read the items was carefully noted down including the seconds (s.) and milliseconds (ms.). Secondly, the whole performance of each participant was recorded so as to listen to it afterwards. As a result, the errors of the participants were counted. Thus, it seems that the participants were supposed to make mistakes or miss a word especially when they read the third slide of incongruent items.

Results
In  There are two essential points to be made. Firstly, there are two errors in the Kurdish naming colour task that belong to participant one and three. The first participant skipped one colour. The third participant used a dialectical counterpart instead of the main word for the colour green which is sawz in Kurdish.
For the latter case, the participant speaks Kurdish semi-official language (Sorani Dialect) fluently.
However, he speaks and uses another Kurdish language variety (Hawleri dialect) in which there is another word for the colour green kask. He utters kask once and it is considered incorrect. This is because he had been informed about this issue before the experiment, and the ninth participant also speaks that local dialect, but she did not make that mistake.
Secondly, it appears that there is a very small difference (15.81 compared to 15.7) between both mean scores of the correct items in the Kurdish and English tasks.

Discussion
This paper examines the reading performance of learners. In other words, the appropriateness of not only the English version of the test, but also the Kurdish version is valuable to be exposed in an academic paper for the first time. Based on the discussion for both first and second research questions, it appears that the participants fully engaged in every step of the test. They also showed outstanding performance in completing the tasks quickly and reading the stimuli accurately. Therefore, Kurdish ESL learners are compatible with the Stroop test which can be adapted to fit further conditions, for example, foreign language context.

Conclusions
The reading performance of Kurdish speakers of English as a second language has been investigated for the first time with respect to Stoop tasks and in light of previous relevant studies. The dominance of the learners" first language, Kurdish, helps in study is going to be in the area of learning languages, language pedagogy, and reading skill; however, the study"s limitations such as its context and its small number of participants can be considered for further investigation.