|
The importance of proficient reading comprehension has been well recognized by Koreans. That has led Korean schools to spend a large amount of time in teaching reading. However, there has not been much research on how to develop reading ability. Thus, the present study was designed to see whether teaching structural characteristics of English, a methodology adopted in Korean classrooms, improves students' reading comprehension. That is, it investigated the effects of explicit explanation of structures of English sentences and discourse using news articles on development of reading ability of Korean EFL learners. In the experiment, 20 college students were required to read one news article a week for 13 weeks and given explicit explanations of meanings of vocabulary and sentence and discourse structures. The results showed that teaching lower order components of reading improved students' ability to find details given in the passage, make inferences, spot the best place to add a new sentence, and complete summaries. The results imply that movie scripts can also be used in teaching reading. That is because they share common features with news articles in that they involve sufficient amount of structural characteristics of English in the form of authentic written and spoken language. |
PDF Links
Full text via DOI
Download Citation
