Comparing effect of ‘summarizing’, ‘question-answer relationship’, and ‘syntactic structure identification’ on the reading comprehension of Iranian EFL students

Abstract

This study aimed at comparing the effects of ‘question-answer relationship strategy’, ‘summarizing’, and ‘syntactic structure identification training’on the reading comprehension of Iranian EFL learners. The participants were sixty (34 women and 26 men) intermediate students who answered an English reading comprehension test consisting of three reading passages as the pretest. During the treatment, the students in the first group were supposed to summarize the passages. The subjects in the second group familiarized with the syntactic structure identification strategy and the ones in the third group were taught the question-answer relationship strategy. At the end of the treatment, an English reading comprehension test similar to the pretest was administered to the groups as a posttest. The results suggested that there is statistically significant difference between the reading comprehension abilities of the three classes. Furthermore the use of QAR strategy led to better comprehension of reading texts with syntactic structure training and summarizing between which there was no significant difference.