چکیده:
This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive strategy instruction on English reading comprehension of Iranian advanced students. A total of 60 participants took part in the present study. The participants (n=20) in oneexperimental group were provided with the cognitive trainingcondition only, while the participants (n=20) in the other experimental group were exposed to both a training and a verbalization requirement condition. The control group (n=20) did not receive any training. Students of the experimental group in both conditions received 10 hours of cognitive strategy training in their regular lessons. The findings in this study generally supported the view that the consciousness- raising of the cognitive strategies had a positive impact on the reading development of Persian-speaking students. Although students of both experimental groups made superior improvements in their comprehension performance, those participants who were given the opportunity to verbalize the learned strategies had more knowledge about strategy use and showed a more positive attitude toward the reading instruction than did their peers who received the cognitive training only. Unlike the experimental groups, the control group reported that their reading ability was the same as before. The results also suggest no statistically significant differences between male and female participants in the use of strategies after the training program.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Although students of both experimental groups made superior improvements in their comprehension performance, those participants who were given the opportunity to verbalize the learned strategies had more knowledge about strategy use and showed a more positive attitude toward the reading instruction than did their peers who received the cognitive training only.
The results also suggest no statistically significant differences between male and female participants in the use of strategies after the training program.
The differences in either the type or frequency of cognitive reading strategies reported by ESL and monolingual students were investigated (Knight, Padron & Waxman, 1985).
For example, it is assumed that women use more social language learning strategies in interaction environments not only in classroom context but also in real world interaction contexts (Politzer, 1983; Ehrman & Oxford, 1989).
3. 3 Procedure The students in the experimental and control groups followed the same advanced, 40- hour English foreign language (EFL) course, based on the course book Interchange: Student’s book 3 (Richards, Hull, & Proctor, 2005).
The participants in the experimental group with the explicit training only condition, including both female and male learners, were instructed to use the cognitive strategies while engaged in classroom reading activities.
1 The effect of cognitive strategy training on Iranian learners’ reading comprehension performance Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of the participants’ test scores and strategy use in three different conditions.
5. Conclusion and Implications This study had the purpose of examining the effect of teacher’s explicit training on learners’ cognitive strategy use and their improvement in reading comprehension.