Thesis:

The Effect of Instructor Text Highlighting and Learner Text Highlighting on the Iranian Advanced EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

Teaching reading comprehension strategies improves English reading skills and one of those strategies is text-highlighting. In this study, the researcher sought to investigate the effects of using text-highlighting strategies on Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension. To this end, she selected 40 advanced English language learners in two classes. After making sure of their homogeneity, a reading comprehension test was administered and the results were analyzed to make sure that there was no significant difference between their performance regarding reading comprehension before commencing the experiment. After implementing the text-highlighting strategies in both groups, learners’ reading comprehension ability was measured through the same test. The results of gathered data revealed that both instructor text-highlighting and learner text-highlighting groups had a positive and significant improvement from the pretest to the posttest. Moreover, the results showed that learner text-highlighting group outperformed instructor text-highlighting group in the posttest. The findings of the present study can be fruitful for English teachers, learners and material developers.

Keywords: Text-highlighting strategies, advanced EFL learners, reading comprehension