The impact of explicit instruction of systemic discourse-semantic knowledge on the reading comprehension of Iranian TEFL undergraduates
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Date
2011
Authors
Aidinlou, Nader Assadi
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Abstract
Reading comprehension has always been problematic for language learners in EFL
setting, and Iranian university students are not exceptional in this regard. This study
investigates the effectiveness of the explicit instruction of systemic discourse-semantic
knowledge, which involves the simultaneous incorporation of the global and local
meaning-making resources, on the reading comprehension of the Iranian students. To
do so, a sample of 60 undergraduate students who had taken an advanced reading
course at two different universities was selected and assigned to experimental and
control groups. Following a non-equivalent control group design, the experimental
group was treated with systemic discourse-semantic knowledge for thirteen sessions
with the control group receiving the traditional grammar-oriented method of teaching
reading. The findings showed that the experimental group outperformed the control
group in reading comprehension, and further that it had a better performance than the
control group on understanding the intra-sentential semantic relationships, and the
discoursal relationships involved in reading comprehension. However, both groups had
relatively similar performance on understanding the inter-sentential semantic
relationships. It can be concluded that the formal teaching of the discourse-semantic
knowledge based on the systemic functional linguistics had a great effect on the
reading comprehension of Iranian TEFL students.
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Keywords
Reading comprehension has always been problematic for language learners in EFL , and Iranian university students are not exceptional in this regard.