The Effect of the K.W.L Strategy Chart in Enhancing Students' Reading Comprehension Skills

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of the K.W.L strategy in enhancing pupils' reading comprehension skills. More specifically, the essence of this study is twofold: examining the influence of using the K.W.L strategy in reading comprehension tasks and gauging teachers’ views on the major difficulties they find their students repeatedly facing in reading comprehension and the strategies they employ to attempt to eliminate them. Thus, it is hypothesized that the use of K.W.L strategy may reflect positively on pupils’ reading comprehension skills. Also, besides the K.W.L method, teachers may employ a variety of other techniques. To achieve the aims of the study, the data were collected by means of a self-constructed questionnaire that has been designed and administered to 5 teachers of English and a true-experiment that was conducted on two groups (24 pupils in each group) of second-year middle-school pupils at Zighoud Youcef middle-school in El Harrouch, Skikda. First, the questionnaire aimed to explore teachers’ opinions on the major difficulties pupils encounter in achieving reading comprehension and their practices in targeting those difficulties. The true-experiment practically tested the possible effectiveness of employing the K.W.L reading strategy on the selected sample groups’ reading comprehension abilities. The results of both data collection tools were descriptively and statistically analyzed then interpreted. The findings obtained validated the hypothesis that the K.W.L strategy had a positive effect on pupils’ reading comprehension abilities. In fact, the results arrived at were through rejecting the null hypothesis an accepting the alternative. Additionally, the findings illustrated the main difficulties faced by the pupils’ and that the teachers used a variety of other techniques other than the K.W.L strategy to tackle those difficulties. Based on the results obtained, some recommendations for further research and for pedagogical practices were suggested