چکیده:
The demands of the changing world impose on learners the need to become autonomous readers. This places a responsibility on the shoulders of the teachers to develop an approach to teaching reading which will help readers become independent strategic ones. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of teaching reading strategies on the development of reading comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. An experimental design was adopted to accomplish this investigation. To do so, two intact classes of 35 students were selected. Then to find out the homogeneity of the participants, Oxford Placement Test was administrated to both classes’ among whom 60 students who scored above 47 were selected as homogeneous and were assigned to two experimental and control groups. The students in the experimental group participated in 10 sessions and were taught two strategies of reading comprehension: activating background knowledge and contextual strategies. At the same time, the materials in the control group were taught through conventional methods of reading and translating the texts into Persian. In the 10th session, the post-test was administrated to both groups. The results of the t-test confirmed the positive effect of reading strategies instruction on the development of reading comprehension ability. These findings may furnish language teachers with the empirical evidence that capitalizing on the students' awareness of the strategies and helping them to1 1 Corresponding Author. Email: ma-torabi@tabrizu.ac.iruse these strategies will significantly develop their reading abilities.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The Effect of Teaching Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategies on Reading Comprehension Ability Mohammad Ali Torabi1 Ahar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahar, Iran.
Since strategy instruction results in successful L2 learning (Carter & Nunan, 2001), most practitioners and researchers ask teachers to raise their students’ awareness of the strategies underlying classroom tasks (Kazem pour, 2007).
In the large number of research studies conducted in the past three decades, comprehension strategy instruction including reading strategies has been justified to be beneficial for helping students become strategic readers and improve their reading comprehension (Koda, 2004; Lee, 2003; Lenski & Nierstheimer, 2002; Rosenshine & Meister, 1994).
It has been suggested that strategy instruction can help students to become better learners; it assists them in becoming independent and confident learners, and finally, become more motivated as they begin to understand the relationship between their use of strategies and success in learning languages (Chamot & Kupper, 1989; Chamot & O’Malley, 1994).
To determine the effect of reading strategy instruction the learners’ reading comprehension ability, an independent T- Test was run on the post-test scores of the experimental and control groups.
The results, also lend support to the findings of several studies indicating that teaching learning strategies can be effective for developing students’ proficiency level in a number of different skills (Cohen, 1998; Hsiao & Oxford, 2002; O'Malley & Chamot, 1990).
The results of the present study also confirm that reading comprehension could be developed through systematic instruction on language learning strategies.