Reading Strategy Instruction and Vocabulary Pre-teaching: A Study on High School EFL Learners’ Reading and Vocabulary Development

Since the late ۱۹۷۰'s, many ESL researchers began to recognize the importance of the strategies ESL students use while reading. Several investigations have been conducted on reading strategies and their relationships to successful and unsuccessful ESL reading (Hosenfeld, ۱۹۷۷; Block, ۱۹۸۶; Jimenez, Garcia, & Pearson, ۱۹۹۵). The use of pre-reading strategies in EFL reading classes reflects course designers’ attempts to activate schemata and make use of students’ prior knowledge to facilitate comprehension. This study tends to investigate the effect of using pre-reading comprehension questions and pre-teaching of vocabularies to assist the EFL learners to improve their reading skill and vocabulary knowledge. The study aimed at improving the reading skill by designing pre-reading questions first then providing them with vocabulary pre-teaching activities. The population of the study was ۴۸ senior high school learners, only females aged ۱۶, in a school in Minab. To ensure the homogeneity of the subjects, a reading and vocabulary test was used. After taking the test and drawing the result, ۱۲ subjects whose scores fell too far from the mean were excluded. The other remaining ۳۶ ones made up the sample of the study and were randomly classified into two groups. The first ۱۸ ones made up the experimental group (EG) and the other ones made up the control group (CG). Two instruments are used: reading tests to assess the learners’ reading and test of vocabulary. The results of the study led to some indications for language teachers and researchers. The findings showed the strategies that were implemented led to relative reading development of the learners. Moreover, it was recommended that the use of reading techniques and strategies could be used effectively if they were taught to students; thus, it can lead to satisfactory achievements. Moreover, pre-teaching of vocabularies impacted the vocabulary scores of the learners positively.