The Effects on Reading Comprehension of Lexical Collocation Instruction, Subject Matter Knowledge, and Cultural Schema
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| Title | The Effects on Reading Comprehension of Lexical Collocation Instruction, Subject Matter Knowledge, and Cultural Schema |
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| Abstract | This study investigated the effects of lexical collocation, topic and cultural familiarity on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension. There were thirty-eight English Translation students in Chabahar Maritime University participating in the present study, 15 freshmen and 23 sophomores. They were chosen from among 45 students based on their scores in the reading comprehension tests. In the treatment period, all the students received three different types of instruction in three consecutive weeks, and took a reading comprehension test after each type of instruction. . In the first week, they received a text that was culturally familiar to them; it was about the origin and development of banks and corporations in Iran. In the second week, they were taught the difficult lexical collocations of the reading text along with their Farsi equivalents before taking the test. And finally in the third week, the students read a reading passage which had the same topic as the reading test before; it was about the communication and behavior of ants. All the students were requested to complete a reading comprehension test, adopted from the paper-based TOEFL tests, after each type of instruction. According to the results demonstrated by the statistical program, a significant difference was found in reading comprehension among the participants based on the type of instruction they received. The highest mean belonged to the third week, when the students read a passage with the same topic before the test as the treatment, followed by the collocation instruction. However, there was no significant difference between boys and girls, and freshmen and sophomores as a result of different types of instruction. |
| Publisher | ACADEMY PUBLISHER |
| Date | 2012-01-01 |
| Source | Theory and Practice in Language Studies Vol 2, No 1 (2012) |
| Rights | Copyright © ACADEMY PUBLISHER - All Rights Reserved.To request permission, please check out URL: http://www.academypublisher.com/copyrightpermission.html. |