The effect of strategy instruction on reading comprehension and students' awareness of reading strategies

النوع : Mémoire

Reading comprehension is mainly the product of three factors: The text, the read er's background knowledge, and strategies used to circumvent any comprehension f ailures. However, not all primary students discover reading strategies and apply strategic processes when confronting texts that are challenging to comprehend. Results of previous research reveal that explicit reading strategy instruction i s a feasible tool for teaching students how to apply them successfully. The aim of this study was to examine the relative effect of Reciprocal Teaching strategy instruction and Question-Answer Relationships in improving EFL students ' reading comprehension, to investigate their relative role in improving EFL stu dents' awareness of reading strategies( Global, Problem Solving, and Support rea ding strategies), and to examine the role of reading strategies awareness in rea ding comprehension. The participants in this intervention were 66 sixth grade mi ddle class students from the Hariri High School II. Three sections were assigned into two experimental groups and one control group. The study used a pre-test p ost test control group quasi-experimental design. A Reading Comprehension Test w as administered prior to and after instruction in order to evaluate the efficacy of the intervention. Students' awareness of reading strategies was measured usi ng The Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS). Descriptive statistics (frequencies, means, and standard deviations), multiple multivariate analyses of co-variance (MANCOVA) tests, and a linear regression test were conducted to answer the quest ions raised in the study. The results revealed that Reciprocal Teaching and Question-Answer Relationships had a significant effect in improving students' reading comprehension. However, the results did not indicate a statistically significant role of these reading s trategies in improving students' awareness of reading strategies. Moreover, the results did not reveal a significant role of the awareness of these strategies i n promoting reading comprehension.