The Effect of Teaching Reading Strategies Explicitly on Students’ Understanding of Cohesion in Reading

Abstract

Research for finding the most effective way of teaching reading is not a new area of interest in SLA; yet, it is still controversial and draws the attention of a lot of researchers and so makes it a state of art knowledge. One of the most appealing sub areas in teaching reading is instructing reading strategies and whether to teach them explicitly or implicitly. This study examined the effect of explicitly instructing reading strategies on learners' perceptions of cohesive ties in reading. These cohesive ties include reference, substitution, lexical cohesion, conjunction, and ellipses. Results suggested that this method can help improve learners' ability to perceive two aspects of cohesiveness: reference and ellipses. The three other aspects, namely conjunction, lexical cohesiveness, and substitution, have been improved as well, although not as much as they were expected to.