the effect of retelling and think aloud as formative assessment techniques on EFL learners reading comprehension

Retelling and think aloud techniques can be used as formative assessment or instructional tools to improve students’ reading comprehension. The goal of reading comprehension as a process of making meaning from text is to gain an overall understanding of what is described in the text rather than to obtain meaning from isolated words or sentences. It seems that there is an important connection between oral language and reading comprehension. Fluent speakers can be good readers and effective readers can speak fluently. Therefore, some effective techniques of teaching and assessing are required to help the learners to be able to understand passages provided in school text books. The present study intended to find out the impact of retelling and think aloud as formative assessment techniques on EFL students' reading comprehension. In this study, 52 male intermediate EFL participants received a Nelson Proficiency test to make sure they were homogeneous. Then, from among them 45 participants were selected and assigned into retelling and think aloud experimental groups as formative assessment techniques and a control group with no assessment in a quasi-experimental study. The results of pre-test and post-test scores from each group with 15 participants were compared and analyzed by using SPSS through one way ANOVA and paired samples T-Tests. The results revealed that retelling and think aloud as formative assessment techniques are effective in improving EFL learners’ text understanding and reading comprehension. When compared, retelling is more advantageous than think aloud in improving reading comprehension in EFL learners.

Keywords:

Formative Assessment , retelling , think aloud , reading comprehension