Mining Perspective and Rhetorical Patterns in Reading for Revision: A Case Study of Iranian Intermediate EFL Readers

Abstract

This paper aims to find how reading skills are influenced by metacognitive strategies of revising and text-mining in Iranian intermediate students majoring in English Translation. A total number of 70 students participated in 2 series of consciousness-raising instructions. The first line of instructional trainings in this study followed from 20 sessions of instruction in reading metacognitive awareness and revising strategies and the second encompassed 20 sessions of instruction on expository rhetorical patterns and their associate discourse markers. Many research studies have proved the role of metacognitive awareness in students’ learning outcome and achievement; however, in this study, the effects of such awareness of revision strategies were not found to be promising in lower-intermediate EFL learners. To address this drawback, the second line of instructional trainings began: the quantitative and qualitative results of this study satisfactorily demonstrated that the lower-intermediate students as well as the upper-intermediate ones developed their reading skills through their awareness of rhetorical organizations and their discourse markers. Pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed in relation to Iran's instructional status.