Abstract:

The aim of this study is to investigate the benefits of the directed reading thinking activity which is traditionally used for preparing students to become successful independent readers. The strategy employs formulating pre-reading, during-reading and post-reading predicting questions and organizing discussions. The study involved 108 sixth-graders who were separated into a control and experimental group. The control group was exposed to traditional style of working with a text while the experimental group used the Directed reading thinking strategy. The whole experiment took 12 weeks. Another part of the research involved two focus groups of 14 English teachers altogether who had regularly used the Directed reading thinking strategy. They were interviewed in order to summarize these teachers’ opinion about all the benefits of this strategy. The results of the experiment with the sixth graders showed an increase in students’ comprehension skills of about 12% while the teachers’ comments indicated various advantages of this strategy and outlined its potential to develop not only learners’ comprehension skills but also their communicative and critical thinking skills, readiness for independent reading as well as written and oral story retelling skills.

Keywords:

Directed reading thinking strategy, foreign language teaching, developing comprehension skills.