Research Question Two
To what extent can the reading component skills discriminate between EFL learners with
different levels of reading proficiency? How do they differ in terms of different levels of reading
proficiency?
Before computing the discriminant analysis, we categorized participants into three
groups: participants whose z-scores on the RCT were higher than 0.5 were regarded as members
of the high-level group (n = 28, 22%); those whose z-scores were between zero and 0.5 were
categorized as the intermediate-level group (n = 72, 57%), while those whose z-scores were less
than zero were considered as the lower-level group (n = 26, 21%). As shown in Table 3, the
majority of the sample was intermediate-level readers. However, it is important to note that this
kind of grouping was based only on the readers’ RCT scores. Similarly, this categorization does
not consider the three groups as completely distinct and diverse, but the variability of the scores