The effect of teaching paragraph structure rules on Iranian intermediate EFL Learners' reading comprehension ability

Abstract

"Reading is useful for language acquisition" (Harmer, 2007, p.99) and more or less it affects different aspects of the learner's life. Reading and writing are two literacy skills which are interconnected, therefore, to become a good reader an understanding of the writing styles is needed. The current research focused on the interrelationship between two literacy skills; reading and writing. According to Rosenblatt's (1988) "transactions theory" which concentrates on the similarities between reading and writing and also, the Harwood's (2002) "lexical approach" which concerns the significance of genre analysis on facilitating the teaching process, the researcher conducted the study on instructing different writing genre characteristics to the learners in reading classes at the paragraph level and its effectiveness on improving the reading comprehension ability of the Iranian intermediate EFL learners was investigated. In order to implement the current research, two groups of homogenized intermediate participants were selected, one as the experimental and the other as the control group and after exercising the treatment, the mean scores of the extracted data from both groups were compared by running independent sample t-test and finally, the study came to this conclusion that these two kinds of treatments had significant difference and the students who were taught reading strategies accompanied by paragraph writing structure rules outperformed the control group which just received common reading strategies. © 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.