Abstract:
The purpose of this study is, to investigate Whether the students' comprehension of the literary content, which consists of the underlying ideas of the story, the type of the story, the development of plot, the characters, and the setting, correlates significantly with their reading achievement; to determine to what extent the comprehension of the literary content can affect their reading achievement and to make a regression equation in order to predict the students' degree of achievement in reading the external readers. The sample of the study consists of 572 secondary school students from five schools, in the B.E. 2519 academic year. A multiple choice test on the students' comprehension of the literary content and a test on their reading comprehension are used to evaluate their reading achievement of John Dent's David and Marianne. The findings are that the students' comprehension of the literary content correlates with their reading achievement of the book at .01 level of significance (with the range of r from .33737 to .55381 ), and that the comprehension of characters is found to have the greatest influence on reading achievement with the percentage of 23 while the influence of the understanding of the development of plot, the setting, the underlying ideas of the story, and the types of the story are of decreasing degrees with the following percentages-21%, 21%, 19% and 16% respectively.