teaching reading strategies in efl reading classrooms: a classroom -centered research

Reading skill is considered as a process that involves the activation of relevant knowledge and language skills to get information across from one individual to another. thus, reading requires active mental processing for communication. teaching reading strategies assists learners to acquire, store, and retrieve new information. readers can improve reading comprehension and rate, and monitor their own improvement in reading comprehension (chamot, 2004). the current study which was a classroom-based, true-experimental design focused on the effectiveness of teaching reading strategies explicitly on the improvement of reading skill of efl adult students at intermediate level in iran. the sample of participants randomly selected was a total number of 132 students at different english language institutes in tehran. the researchers worked on instructing a number of subcategories of cognitive, metacognitive, and social strategies in the experimental group, while a comparison group did not receive any explicit strategy instruction. results revealed that reading strategies did indeed affect students` performance. that is, teaching students to become more strategic when they read increases their understanding of important information, improves their fluency, enhances learner autonomy, and makes them motivated.