Enhancement of Implicit Non-linguistic Content Knowledge as an Invaluable By-product of Intensive Reading Courses

A distinction is often made, in ELT and in the teaching of other languages, between extensive and intensive reading. The latter, unlike the former is often ‘teacher-directed’ and, in some contexts, organization-directed, aiming at developing reading skills, such as skimming, scanning, inferencing, and so on in the learners. Intensive reading coursebooks, with a mixture of various passages of science, culture, history, health, industry, geography, sociology, marketing, global warming and so on, familiarize students with reading skills and require them to practice these skills through comprehension question items and tasks. Educationalists and teachers in the field of FLT are rightly concerned about optimizing the development of such skills in the learners, ‘Rightly’, because the learners must go through a temporary stage of ‘learning to read’ in order to acquire a life-long capacity of ‘reading to learn’. By the same token, most studies having been done on reading comprehension have focused on the effect of this factor or the impact of that variable, linguistic or nonlinguistic, such as strategies instruction, while reading questioning, background knowledge, field dependence versus filed independence. on the enhancement of the reading comprehension in the learners. This research, however, is intended to swim against the tide, and like a limited number of investigations into the impact of reading comprehension on nonlinguistic factors such as critical thinking, attempts to probe whether the passages in a reading course book add up any ‘nonlinguistic’ ‘content’ knowledge, being described as an invaluable byproduct by the researcher, to the learners. The subjects are 115 undergraduate students of English translation at Adib-e Mazandaran university of Sari divided into two groups of experimental and control. The instrumentation includes a Nelson test to ensure the homogeneity of the groups in terms of the subjects’ general English performance, a standardized researcher-made test of content of the reading book ‘Inside Reading 1’ introduced as the coursebook of the experimental group during the semester and a test of reading comprehension. The results of parametric t-test showed that intensive reading passages have highly improved the students’ non linguistic content knowledge. No significant differences were found between boys’ and girls’ performance. However, a high correlation was found between the scores of the content test and those of the reading test.

کلیدواژه ها:

intensive reading ، invaluable byproduct ، reading comprehension coursebook ، content knowledge enhancement