Effects of Raising Awareness of Lexical Cohesion on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension Performance

The present study aims at investigating the effect of awareness raising of lexical cohesion on EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance. Thirty high school students’ studying at Andisheh and Molasadra high schools in Kangavar, Iran were chosen from four classes. They were randomly assigned to two Control and Experimental groups with 15 students in each group. Ten passages were taught during one month to both groups with the same method predetermined at schools except for the fact that subjects in the experimental group were also given lots of examples for lexical devices and were asked to locate them in the texts taught through oral questions and group work. The instrument used in this study was a lexical cohesion test containing two tests as pre- and post- tests. Paired and independent sample t-tests were used to answer the research question. Results indicated a significant improvement in the reading scores of the subjects in the experimental group

Keywords:

lexical cohesion , reading comprehension , raising awareness