Abstract:
The present study was conducted to examine empirically and systematically the effect of explicit instruction of comprehension strategies on EFL learners‟ reading anxiety and reading comprehension in Iranian high schools. To this end, two intact classes (65 students) participated in this study as members of control and experimental groups. The experimental group underwent 10 sessions of reading strategies training based on McNamara, Ozuro, Best, and O‟Reilly's (2007) 4-pronged Comprehension Strategy Framework. Data were collected through the employment of Saito, Garza, and Horwitz's (1999) Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS) and Preliminary English Test (PET) multiple-choice reading comprehension tests. All the students filled the FLRAS questionnaire and took the reading comprehension test two times, once as a pre-test one week before the beginning of instruction and the other as a post-test one week after the instructional treatment. After the post-test, a group of 7 students who received instruction participated in the focus group interview. T-tests were used to analyze the obtained statistical data. It was revealed that explicit reading strategy instruction was quite beneficial in improving EFL high school students' comprehension and reducing their anxiety level, while reading anxiety and reading comprehension were negatively correlated. The results of the interview with the focus group revealed the positive effect of strategy training on learners' reading comprehension and alleviating reading anxiety. This study rendered some educational implications for materials developers and instructors to invest on reading as a fundamental skill in education.
Machine summary:
"A. in TEFL, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Iran Received: March 7, 2015; Accepted: October 29, 2015 Abstract The present study was conducted to examine empirically and systematically the effect of explicit instruction of comprehension strategies on EFL learners‟ reading anxiety and reading comprehension in Iranian high schools.
For the qualitative part of the study which aimed at finding out the physical, emotional and verbal reactions of learners to the anxiety provoking situations and also investigating the effect of comprehension strategy instruction on reading anxiety and reading performance, the researcher carried out a focus group interview with the participants.
Research Question 2 An independent ttest was run to compare the experimental and control groups‟ mean scores on the posttest of reading anxiety in order to probe the effect of comprehension instruction on the reduction of the reading anxiety of EFL learners.
Findings of the present study regarding the effect of reading strategy instruction on foreign language reading anxiety are in contrast to Capan and Pektas' (2013) study which indicated that exposing learner to training on different reading strategies would lead to an ascend in the FLRA level of the participants.
Moreover, the focus group interview supported the results of statistical analyses and pinpointed the positive effect of strategy training on learners' reading comprehension which is in line with many studies in literature on reading strategy (Ahmadi & Pourhossein, 2012; Anderson, 2005; Grabe, 2004).
CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS This study investigated the effect of explicit reading strategy instruction on the Iranian high school students' EFL reading comprehension and Foreign Language Reading Anxiety (FLRA)."