خلاصة:
One of the most important language skills affecting students’ success in academic settings is reading comprehension and the ability to read fluently in a second language. Japanese EFL learners’ less-than-satisfactory performance in standard English tests led Shinozuka, Mizusawa, and Shibata (2014) to design the read-aloud method. This study investigated the effectiveness of this newly designed method on Iranian EFL Learners’ reading comprehension. The aforementioned method with its high priority on reading aloud enjoy four main activities: chunked reading practice, read-aloud practice, cloze test, and concurrent read-aloud and summarization. Participants of this study, selected through convenience sampling, were 140 undergraduate students whose English reading comprehension was considered poor based on the pretest. Then, the subjects were assigned in two groups of control (N = 40) and experimental (N = 100). The subjects in experimental group received 8 teaching sessions, while the control group received no specific training. Using a pretest-posttest design we attempted to see if read-aloud method turns to affect our subjects’ reading ability level. Therefore, some T-tests were run. The results of the statistical analyses demarcated that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in the posttest. The pedagogical implication of this study is that ESL/EFL instructors can implement the read-aloud method in their classes to promote their students’ reading comprehension.
ملخص الجهاز:
The Effect of Read-Aloud Method on Iranian EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension Dr. Ali Mohammad Fazilatfar٭(Corresponding Author) Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics & TESL, English Dept.
Japanese EFL learners’ less-than-satisfactory performance in standard English tests led Shinozuka, Mizusawa, and Shibata (2014) to design the read-aloud method.
One of the main outcomes of these studies is that they have helped us better understand the reason for which reading skill was traditionally viewed as a passive skill with no specific place in language teaching, and how it has been increasingly viewed as an interactive, constructive, and contextualized process with a primary role in promoting students’ communicative competence (Juan & Flor, 2006).
In Japan, students’ bad results in standard and widely acclaimed language tests such as IELTS and TOEFL led Shinozuka, Mizusawa, and Shibata (2014) to design the read-aloud method.
Finally, the last goal of this research is to examine the interaction of the pretest and posttest results of the experimental group through read-aloud method.
In a research conducted by Snow (2002 as cited in Anjomshoa & Zamanian, 2014), it was shown that as children moved toward higher levels of education, the association between their reading comprehension level and vocabulary knowledge was substantially improved.
The instructor first chunked read the whole text for the students and asked them to 88 The Journal of Applied Linguistics and Applied Literature: Dynamics and Advances, Volume 4, Issue 2, Summer and Autumn, 2016, pp.
Conclusion The fundamental objective behind conducting this research was to provide an effective instruction for EFL students at university level using read-aloud method developed by Shinozuka et al.