The Effect of Explicit Instruction of Cognitive Strategies on EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension performance
By, Sima Shirdelpour, Islamic Azad University, Email: sintiash@yahoo.com
Abstract
From the perspective of education as a long life process, one of the main aims of the educator is to help students cope with self-directed, autonomous learning. Teaching students to read effectively unaided would seem to be potentially a powerful contribution to this aim. In this respect, the present study tends to investigate the effect of explicit instruction of cognitive strategies on EFL learner’s reading comprehension performance. For this purpose, 60 female students studying at the advanced level in an English institute were selected and homogenized through administration of Longman (TOEFL) test. After dividing participants into two groups (experimental and control), a pre-test consisting of multiple choice items based on 5 reading passages was administered to both groups. After treatment which lasted for 8 sessions, the same pre-test but this time as a post-test was administered to both groups. The results of the analysis indicate that the experimental group’s performance on the post-test was significantly different from the control group’s one, while the two groups performed similarly on the pre-test.
Introduction
As Chastain (1988) claimed, reading is a process involving the activation of language knowledge and related language skills to accompany an exchange of information from one person to another. Reading requires active mental processing for communication to occur, so it is an active skill. It is also, a receptive skill in that the reader is receiving a message from a writer. Many writers have also referred to reading as a decoding skill. Actually, it drives from the idea of language as a code, and emphasize the active role, the reader must play in reading.
On one hand, reading is an important component of learning a second language for various reasons. It is the skill that students will in all likelihood have the most opportunities to use and that they can use most conveniently. Another benefit of reading is that students can control the speed at which they read, and it can be performed in privacy. So, it can be adjusted to the individual’s pace of learning and ability.
On the other hand, there are ways by which learners can enhance their own reading. Learner autonomy, which is one of the characteristics of post method learner, is the capability to govern and regulate one’s own thoughts, feelings, and actions freely. Learner autonomy consist of becoming aware of, and identifying one’s strategies, needs, and goals as a learner, and having the opportunity to reconsider and refashion approaches and procedures for optimal learning (Thanasoulas, 2000). It means that raising learner’s awareness of the language learning process could be done through the learner’s own reflection on how they learn. Reflection makes learners active in the sense that they learn to analyze their learning strategies, thus, they start to make decisions, e.g., whether to prove it or not, and in what way. This study shows that, reading strategies are of interest not only for what they reveal about the ways readers manage their interactions with written text, but also for how the use of strategies is related to effective reading comprehension.
Features of reading comprehension
A description of reading has to account for the notion that fluent reading is rapid, purposeful, interactive, comprehending, flexible, and gradually developing (Grabe, 1997). It is also mentioned that reading requires sufficient knowledge of language, world, and a given topic. Bartu (2001) also claimed that reading like other instances of language use, has three dimensions: the text, interaction of people involving processes of production and interpretation of the text, and it is also a social action. So, reading is beyond just recognizing the words. It is an interaction between the text and the reader within the social action.
There are different types of reading depending on the style of the text and the type of interaction between the text and the reader. Tomlinson (2000) classifies reading task into experiential and studial reading depending on the purpose of reading. In experiential reading, we read without paying much conscious attention neither to the content nor to the application of reading strategies. We read holistically rather than analytically. But in studial reading, we read with conscious effort and attention.
Heaton (1988) also classifies reading to intensive and extensive one. The former is in a form of short extracts of a moderate degree of difficulty containing features which merit detailed study and the latter is in the form of whole article, chapters and books (usually simplified). Materials are generally below the language attainment level of the students.
Intensive reading is also used because it is more emotional to have a large number of items based on a short reading extract. The main goal of this type of reading is to get information. This type of reading actively can be most useful to test the students’ reading ability.
Extensive reading includes texts such as newspaper, article instructions for using appliances, public notes, etc. they provide more realistic and reliable means of assessment and help to motivate students by demonstrating how the target language is used in real life situations. Materials which are used in this type should be as authentic as possible. The main goal in this type is reading for pleasure. So, they can be used in teaching activities.
Reading comprehension, according to Widdoson (1978), is a reasoning activity, whereby the reader creates meaning on the basis of textual clues. It is very important to teach students to read for understanding the meaning of a text rather than decoding the letters and words. As Ur (1996) believes, when we begin to read a text or when there is no helpful context, we depend on decoding the letters to understand words; but as soon as there is a meaningful context we tend to bring our own interpretation to the word according to its general ‘shape’ and the sense of the text rather than according to its exact component letters.
So, Reading activities should stress reading for understanding rather than exact decoding of letters, and the strategy of finding the main idea of a text or predicting the content of a text on the basis of the topic of the text should be taught to the learners.
Ur (1996) also claims, sometimes we skip or misread words in order to make sense of the whole more quickly or conveniently. So, we should encourage the students to go for the overall meaning of a text.
Reading process
The study of reading components is an important way to understand how fluent readers comprehend texts. Grabe (1997) divided these components into two major parts: lower level processing and higher level processing
Lower level processing
Lower level processing can be discussed in three sub-components processes:
The recognition of orthographic structure, the recognition of morpheme structure, and the processing of phonemic information. The three sub word processes all work together as part of word recognition, or lexical access.
Higher level processing
In this level, text comprehension extends beyond sentence level propositional integration by incorporating each newly formed propositional unit in working memory into a textual propositional network, a text model of comprehension.
Models of reading
In order to make a clearer sense of the operations and interrelationships among components of reading, models have become very useful. Since the 1960s and the early 1970s, a number of scholars including Goodman (1969, cited in Urqurt and Weir, 1988), and Smith (1971, cited in Alderson, 1991) has developed models of reading process which can be divided into four main models:
Bottom-up
Bottom-up approaches are serial models, where the reader begins with the printed word, recognizes graphic stimuli, decodes them to sound, recognizes words and decodes meanings. Each component involves sub processes. Sub processes which are higher up in the chain cannot, however, feed back into components lower down.
Top-down
Top-down models conceptualize the reading process as one in which, stages that are higher interact with stages which occur earlier in the sequence. This approach emphasizes the importance of reader’s contribution over the incoming text. Reading is viewed as being conceptually driven by the higher order stages rather than by lower level stimuli analysis and this can be considered as the main difference between bottom-up and top-down models.
Interactive
In this model every component in the reading process can interact with any other component, be it ‘higher up’ or ‘lower down’. Processing, in fact,
is now thought to be parallel rather than serial (Grabe, 1991).
Interactive compensatory
Stanovich (1980, cited in Alderson, 2000), proposed that a process at any level can compensate for deficiencies at any other level, regardless of their level in the processing hierarchy. This model is interactive in the sense that any stage may interact with other stage, and it is compensatory in the sense that the reader may rely on better developed knowledge sources when they are temporarily weak.
Language learning strategies
Different definitions for strategy have been presented to make us aware of what we mean by strategy. Rubin (1987), argued that “learning strategies are strategies which contribute to the development of the language system which the learner constructs and affect learning directly” (p. 23). In their seminal study, O’Malley and Chamot (1990, cited in Brown, 1993), defined learning strategies as “the specials thought or behavior that individuals use to help them comprehend, learn, or retain new information” (p. 115). As Oxford (1990) puts it learning strategies “…are especially important for language learning because they are tools for active, self directed involvement, which is essential for developing communicative competence” (p.45). In addition learning strategies are important because research suggests that training students to use learning strategies can help them become better language learners.
Reading strategies
Reading strategies are of interest not only for what they reveal about the wys readers manage their interactions with the written text, but also for how the use of strategies is related to effective reading comprehension. Strategies are actions selected deliberately to achieve particular goals, so they are reader oriented (Brown, 1993). Reading strategies include any of the wide array of tactics that readers use to engage and comprehend text: from traditionally recognized reading behaviors as skimming the text to get the general idea, scanning a text for a specific piece of information, making contextual guesses about the meaning of unknown words, skipping unknown words, tolerating ambiguity, making predictions, confirming or disconfirming inferences to more recently recognized strategies such as activating prior background knowledge and recognizing text structure (Carrell, 1998).
The number of studies of verbal protocols of reading has shown that strategic reading is a prime characteristic of expert readers because it is woven into “reading for meaning” and the development of this cognitive ability. On the other hand, unskilled readers do not use strategies or effectively without help. Several of these studies identified relationships, between certain types of reading strategies and successful and unsuccessful second language reading; but unfortunately, the relationship between strategies and comprehension are not simple and straight-forward. Use of certain reading strategies does not always lead to successful reading comprehension (Anderson, 2000; Kern, 1997). They concluded from their data that successful second language reading comprehension is not simply a matter of knowing what strategy to use, but the reader must also know how to use it successfully. They also found that there are good and bad uses of the same strategy in other words the difference is how strategies are operationalized.
Strategic reader
Strategic readers construct meaning as they read and interact with the text. They set purposes for reading, select methods of accomplishing these purposes monitor and repair their comprehension as they read, and evaluate the completed task. The strategic reader constructs, examines and extends meaning before, during and after reading for a variety of texts (Janzen, 1996). Strategies such as: metacognitive, memory-related, affective, cognitive, compensatory, etc. and the use of them is related to the purpose of reading. Also, locating the information occurs as a result of a number of different processes, depending on the reader’s purpose. Teachers who understand that reading is a strategic process establish environment that provide opportunities for children to learn language and learn about language while they are using language for real purposes.
Cognitive strategies
According to Oxford’s classification (Oxford, 1990, p.17), cognitive strategies are the part of direct strategies which directly involve the target language. Oxford 1990, argued that four types of cognitive strategies exist:
1) Practicing
Strategies for practicing are among the most important cognitive strategies. Practicing strategies include: repeating, formal practicing with sounds and writing systems, recognizing and using formulas and patterns, recombining, and practicing naturalistically.
2) Receiving and sending message
One such strategy known as getting the idea quickly helps learners locate the main idea through skimming or the key points of the interest through scanning. Another strategy in this group is using resources which are useful for both comprehension and production.
3) Analyzing and reasoning
These kinds of strategies are commonly used by learners, especially adults who tend to ‘reason out’ the new language. They include: reasoning deductively, analyzing expressions, analyzing contrastively, translating and transferring.
4) Creating structure for input and output
These strategies are ways to create structures, which is necessary for both comprehension and production in the target language. Such as: taking note, summarizing and highlighting.
Strategic Reading Instruction
Instruction can be effective in providing students with repertoire of the strategies that promote comprehension monitoring and foster comprehension. For students to become motivated strategic strategy users, they need “systematically orchestrated instruction or training” (Alexander, 1996 cited in Dreyer, 2003)
Sehlaoui (2001), believed that teaching and learning to read in and EFL context is a challenging task. It means teachers should not only know what to teach and how to teach, but also why teach in that way. They need to become both critical intellectuals (teach effectively and make sound that the pedagogical decisions), and the transformative intellectuals (able to defend their pedagogical decisions in front of others). To teach strategies and techniques, first we should recognize those strategies which successful readers use or those which are proved to be of great advantage in reading process. This is certainly the case if the individual student is expected to complete the items as an individual activity. One of the main aims of the educator is to help students cope with self-directed, autonomous learning.
Teaching the students to read effectively unaided would seem to be potentially a powerful contribution of this. If we can help students to read carefully on their own for their own purposes, then this would be successful indeed. Farrell (2001) asserted that success in learning mainly depends on appropriate language use and that successful learners can improve their learning by being trained to use effective strategies. Janzen and Stoller (1998, cited in Farrell, 2001), argued that for incorporating reading instruction that emphasizes a strategic behavior, in each teachers should explain what the strategies are and why they are important in helping to improve a reading comprehension. They also argued that teachers should model the strategies, give feed back, and reminded students about the benefits of strategy use.
Therefore, the vital role of teacher as the instructor of the strategy is observed. Identifying the strategy, the while and when of it, modeling the strategy in an appropriate context on one hand, and encouraging independent application of strategy, monitoring, and assessing it by the students on the other hand, are among those teachers maxims concerning the strategic instruction.
Justification for an emphasis on the developments of reading comprehension is not hard to find. In Iran like many other countries English as a foreign language is learned by numbers of students who will never have the opportunity of conversing with native speakers, but who will have access to the literature, or a scientific and technical journals written in English. Many will need these publications that to assist them with further studies or in their work; others will wish to enjoy reading in English in their leisure time to keep them in touch with the wider world. So, reading is the primary source of formation about all sorts of topics.
Based on the foregoing discussion, the present study attempts to investigate “The Effect of Explicit Instruction of Cognitive Strategies on EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension performance”. In this respect the study strives to answer the following research question:
- Does Explicit Instruction of Cognitive Strategies have any effect on EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension performance”?
Based on the research question, the following null hypothesis is formulated:
- Explicit Instruction of Cognitive Strategies has no effect on EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension performance”.
Method
Subjects:
Subjects were 60 female students who were studying at the advanced level in an English language institute. The rationale for choosing students studying at this level is that according to the literature, for reading strategy training a basic knowledge of grammar, acceptable amount of vocabulary, and relatively full familiarity with L1 reading strategies are needed because we do not need to teach grammatical points or even new vocabulary items through reading a text. The age of the students ranged from 23 to 30 with a mean of 26. Therefore, age and sex play the role of a control variable this study.
Instruments:
For conducting this study, a test of reading comprehension consisting of five passages was used as both pre-test and post-test. The passages were selected from NTC’s preparation for TOEFL. The test has 30 items in all. Another test being used in this study was Longman (preparation for TOEFL) which served the purpose of homogenizing.
Procedures:
At first, the above mentioned Longman test was administered to 85 EFL students studying at an advanced level in an English institute. The test took 50 minutes. Based on the scored obtained from the test, 60 students (within the range of X 1 SD) were randomly selected. Then the 60 students, who were homogenized in terms of English language proficiency, were randomly divided into two groups; one control and one experimental, each consisting of 30 students.
As a pre-test a test of reading comprehension (mentioned above) was administered to both groups. Next, the treatment which was the explicit instruction of cognitive strategies started. The experimental group received strategy training which includes: contextualizing, inferencing, taking notes, skimming, scanning, making predictions, main idea identification, text structure recognition, and activating prior knowledge. The strategy training included information on what each strategy is, how to use each of the strategies, why each strategy should be learned, when and where the strategies are recommended to use, and how the learner can evaluate her own use of the strategy. The teacher helped students identify or become aware of strategies they were already using, then she presented and explained a new strategy with the rationale for using it. This was followed by practicing it, at first with substantial support, but gradually reducing it to encourage autonomous use. Finally, students were helped to evaluate their success. So the role of the teacher as learner trainer as well as language instructor is seen as one of the gradual withdrawal with the objective that, by the end of the course, the student should be able to apply the strategies independently.
On the other hand, the control group received no instruction in this respect but the same traditional approach to reading comprehension: presenting students with a text, the teacher asked questions and students answered, and feedback was limited to the student’s answers.
However, the study lasted for 8 successive sessions and the same instructor dealt with both groups. At the end of the course the same pre-test but this time as a post-test was administered to both control & experimental groups.
Results
The appropriate statistical technique for analyzing the collected data was independent
t-test.
Table 1. Descriptive statistics and independent t-test values (P< 0.05, t critical = 2.000)
As table 1 displays, the amount of t value for Longman test supports the fact that both experimental and control groups enjoy the same level of language proficiency prior to the treatment (t critical> t observed).
The second box in the table shows the amount of observed t value for pre-test which is lower than the amount of t critical value. This means that both experimental and control groups were at the same level in terms of reading comprehension ability and prior to the treatment. (t critical > t observed ).
The third box in the table identifies the amount of observed t value for post-test which is higher than the amount of critical t value. This implies that experimental and control groups are significantly different from each other and experimental group outperformed on post-test, rejecting the null hypothesis (t observed > t critical).
Discussion
Based on the results of statistical analysis, we can claim that the instruction of cognitive reading strategies has had a powerful effect on EFL learners’ reading performance.
The table shows that the experimental group performed on post-test significantly better than the control group. Also the same table reveals that there was already no difference between the performances of these two groups on pre-test, implying that there were at the same level of reading comprehension ability prior to the treatment. So, this is the treatment which has been a source of difference between the results of post-test.
However, what we need to beer in mind is that skilled readers do not get that way overnight. They learn how to do this complex thing we call reading by doing it repeatedly, over long periods of time, with lots of different texts, and with lots of opportunities to practice applying strategies, and monitoring their processes and evaluating the effectiveness of different strategies for themselves in different reading situations. Therefore, cognitive reading strategy teaching should also be a long term educational process, with constant attention and support over longer periods of time.
Suggestions
The results of this study suggest several directions for future studies. As it has been discussed in the literature, a major problem with strategy training is that there are so many potential training strategies, interactions with student learning styles, and training contexts (Grabe, 1991). Establishing consistent results in second language situations will be difficult until many more strategy training experiments are conducted. Second language researchers are just beginning to explore the issues in this area, and many research studies claiming success in L1 context need to be replicated in L2 context to see if such claims can be generalized to second language students. Students with different levels of language proficiency and different sexes can be considered as good subjects for further investigation to see how the result of experiment may be affected by other factors.
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