The Effect of the Reading Strategy on EFL Iranian Learners’ Reading Comprehension Performance

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of the reading strategy on EFLIranian learners’ reading comprehension performance. students have difficulties inunderstanding texts. One solution to the problem of poor reading comprehension is thelearning of reading strategies. The participants of this study were 61 EFL students ofintermediate level were selected and they were randomly divided into two identicalgroups, One group was experimental group (n=31) and the other one was the controlgroup (n=30). Students were determined with several reading comprehension passagesand tasks during ten weeks of experiment three sessions each week, 45 minutes induration. Fifteen reading passages of suitable length from Reading and VocabularyDevelopment 3 Causes and Effect by Ackert and Lee (2005) and Active Skills forReading: Book 3 by Anderson (2013) was given to the participants. Also,Thehomogeneity of their proficiency level was established using a TOEFL proficiency test.All students in both groups participated in a reading comprehension test as pre-test. In theexperimental group,The students read, shared, and discussed the reading and thencompleted the related exercises individually, in pairs or in small groups. And the recyclecontinued until the end of the experiment. In the control group, the researcher followedthe ordinary approaches of teaching reading comprehension. Data were collected andanalyzed through paired and independent samples t-test to compare the means of the pretestand the post-test in both groups.The statistical method was done through descriptiveand inferential statistics through IBM SPSS ,version 17. The results showed a successfuluse of a reading strategy depends on different factors such as the knowledge of how toutilize that strategy which was provided through a strategy based instruction.The findingsof the study showed that reading strategy has a significant effect on learners’readingcomprehension .Implications of the study suggest that comprehension strategies such assummarizing could be considered as an effective method for teaching and learning ofreading skill.