Abstract:

One of the major problems of Pakistani school going students in learning English language is their lack of ability to comprehend the language. Unfortunately, a large number of students fail to pass the high stake tests as these students are not provided with sufficient background of comprehension strategies of learning English language. The purpose of this study was to fill this gap and teach students different reading strategies which are highly effective in increasing students’ comprehension of the language and which have successfully been implemented in various countries whose first language is not English. In this experimental study, two groups of 9th graders in a public high school in Punjab, each comprised 30, were randomly selected for the experiment. A pretest-post test control group design was used for this study. Two teachers having same qualification (in English language) were randomly assigned to each group. Three unseen comprehension passages were given to both groups as pretest in which both groups performed in a similar way. Six learning strategies (predicting, skimming, scanning, guessing the meaning of the word from context, making inference, and self-monitoring) of Oxford’s (1990) learning strategies an Anderson’s (1991) reading strategies were used to increase student comprehension. The experimental group was taught these strategies through cooperative learning method STAD (student teams achievement division) while control group was taught by traditional method. After three month experiment post test was conducted in which five unseen passages were given to students and they were required to answer the questions given in the end of each passage. The study found that experimental group significantly performed better than control group. (258 words)

Keywords:

Comprehension strategies, cooperative learning, skimming, scanning, guessing.