Comparing the effectiveness of study strategies on comprehension, retention, and learning from L2 English texts

Abstract

This study compared the use of the study strategies rereading, highlighting, and note-taking on the levels of comprehension, retention, and learning from L2 texts. Nineteen intermediate students of English (L2) participated in the study. In phase 1, they studied three expository texts in English, each with the support of a different strategy. After reading, they answered an immediate recall and true/false statements. Phase 2 took place a week after and comprised delayed recalls and a critical writing task. Prior to data collection, participants received instruction on study strategies to ensure they knew about the strategies to be worked with. Results of immediate recalls pointed to rereading as an effective strategy to comprehension; highlighting was related to higher true or false scores. Regarding retention, good performance in the delayed recalls was associated with the highlighting and note-taking conditions. Thus, the effects of rereading did not endure delayed tests, providing evidence for the ineffectiveness of this strategy for retention compared to highlighting and note-taking. Results from the critical writing task demonstrated that the task fostered elaborative inferencing, although the number of explicit text references was small. A link between highlighting and learning is hypothesized.