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Presenters
Diako Hamzezadeh Afkham
Najme Pourjeafarian
Nasser Rashidi,
Shiraz University
Iran

Title
The effects of reading strategy instruction on EFL learners' reading anxiety and reading comprehension performance

Abstract

The present study sets out to investigate the effects of students’ awareness and implementation of reading strategies on their abilities in reading comprehension. To carry out the study two classes of male and female students were selected randomly from English institutes in Shiraz, 40 of them were assigned to experimental and control groups (each 20 male and female). Having primarily established the learners’ existing strategy awareness and use, the researchers embarked upon explicit strategies instruction to experimental group, during which learners’ reading strategy use was improved and reviewed at regular intervals by means of review exercises and tests. The control group did not receive any treatment about reading strategies.

To collect the required data, two reading comprehension tests to assess their reading comprehension and two questionnaires on reading strategies, and reading anxiety were used as the tools for data collection. A group of 20 students was trained to utilize reading comprehension strategies in reading English texts during the period of 10 sessions while another group (20 students) was given no instruction in strategies. The findings of study show the effectiveness of strategy awareness on students’ better performance on reading comprehension test and anxiety reduction.

Key words: reading strategies, readers’ awareness of reading strategies, reading comprehension skill, purposive sampling, and comprehension task.