Tesis doctoral de Lucia Osa Melero
Reading and understanding complex texts about history and/or socio-political topics has become a difficult task for intermediate-high level second language students due to the fact that most of the times these students lack the background knowledge to understand the intricacy of the text. It has been proved that when presented with historical and socio-political texts, many students feel frustrated, discouraged and anxious. as the literature confirms, many studies have shown that cooperative activities, with the required guidance and structure, facilitate the process of learning in different disciplines; whereas non-guided and non-structured traditional groups activities do not enhance learning as cooperative activities do. In search of strategies that may help the students improve their reading comprehension, three different types of pre-reading activities have been examined: guided and structured cooperative; traditional learning groups, and textbook-based individual. the purpose of this quantitative research study is to compare and evaluate the effects of the three different types of pre-reading activities on the reading comprehension of second language intermediate-high university students of spanish, whose native language is english. The research questions that led the study investigated the effects of guided and structured cooperative; traditional learning group; and textbook based individual pre-reading activities on the students. the participants of this semester-long quantitative research study are the teacher-researcher, four instructors, and 117 students of spanish fourth-semester at the university of texas at austin. The measurement tools employed to collect the data are multiple-choice tests and recall protocols. The mean scores obtained by both measurement tools after the implementation of the pre-reading treatments are compared using a test for paired data. findings indicated that cooperative pre-reading activities have a positive effect on the students reading comprehension when implemented following the required guidelines. These guidelines include a specific structure of activities, and guidance by the instructor during the completion of the activities. The study also showed that textbook-based individual pre-reading activities enhanced the students reading comprehension when compared with those scores from traditional groups with no guidance and fixed structure. Therefore the results suggest that cooperative pre-reading activities must be carefully implemented in order to be beneficial to the students reading comprehension. When cooperative activities are not correctly implemented and become traditional group activities with no guidance or structure, the scores achieved by the students are lower than those obtained from textbook-based individual treatments.
Datos académicos de la tesis doctoral «A comparative analysis of the effects of three pre-reading activity types on the reading comprehension of fourth-semester students of spanish in an english-speaking environment«
- Título de la tesis: A comparative analysis of the effects of three pre-reading activity types on the reading comprehension of fourth-semester students of spanish in an english-speaking environment
- Autor: Lucia Osa Melero
- Universidad: Universitat de valéncia (estudi general)
- Fecha de lectura de la tesis: 23/06/2009
Dirección y tribunal
- Director de la tesis
- Carmen Gregori Signes
- Tribunal
- Presidente del tribunal: esperanza Román mendoza
- José Francisco Fernández sánchez (vocal)
- María noemí Domínguez García (vocal)
- Francisco Zayas martínez (vocal)