The Relationship Between Reading Aloud Strategies and Comprehension Among the Iranian EFL learners in Pre-Intermediate Levels

Abstract

However different studies have focused on the importance of reading aloud to children in the first language teaching situations as a means of improving their comprehension and encouraging them to read, this technique has been neglected in foreign language situations or teaching techniques. This paper have done in one of the English Language Institute in Sabzevar, a city in Khorasan Razavi province, in order to find out whether the teacher’s reading aloud to learners of English as a foreign language leads to a higher level of comprehension than when the learners read silently on their own. In one session of the class, students were given three passages to read silently and asked to answer five multiple-choice comprehension questions in each passage. In another day the researcher read aloud three other passages of comparable reading difficulty to the same students before asking them to answer the comprehension questions. The results show that the students’ scores were significantly higher in the second testing session, which indicates a positive effect of the reading aloud technique on the learners reading comprehension. Moreover, in answer to a short questionnaire, 73% of the subjects reported that they are interested in the teacher’ reading aloud strategy.

Key words: Reading aloud strategies; Comprehension; Teaching techniques