the effect of project work on reading and autonomy of iranian efl learners

The present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of project work on reading and autonomy of iranian efl learners. in order to conduct the study, in order to test null hypotheses, 60 male and female english language learners, studying english at the intermediate level in jahad daneshgahi sharif institute were selected out of an initial 90 intermediate efl learners based on their performance on a piloted version of preliminary english test (pet). the selected participants were divided into two groups: one experimental group and one control group with 30 students in each, consisting of 12 to 15 students in each class. the data for the present study were collected by means of four instruments; a pet test of language proficiency, an autonomy questionnaire (zhang & li, 2004), and a validated researcher-made comprehension pretest, and a reading comprehension posttest. the learners in both experimental and control groups went through the process of pretesting, intervention, and post testing. to analyze the data, the null-hypotheses were probed through spss version 24 and measures of independent-samples t-test and one-way analysis of covariance (one-way ancova) were used. it is worth mentioning that the assumptions related to ancova were also met. the results of data analysis were checked against the previous study results and reported. the result of ancova firstly revealed that project work had a statistically significant effect on the reading comprehension of iranian efl learners. secondly, it was revealed that that project work had a statistically significant effect on the autonomy of iranian efl learners. both of these findings signify that the treatment the learners in the experimental group went through was effective and working with project work could highly affect both autonomy and reading comprehension ability of efl learners in the iranian context. the findings have implications for efl classroom.