The Influence of Collaborative Learning Strategy (CLS) on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners Reading Comprehension

No longer are students’ experiences with new languages limited to their textbooks. With the pervasiveness of new techniques, both teachers and students all over the world are seeking ways that will further accelerate their ability to acquire or teach a second or foreign language. Recent years have witnessed a growing emphasis on the employment of collaborative learning strategy (CLS) into teaching different language skills among them reading that is the most important one regarded essential to educational success. This study adopted a pretest/posttest assessment of the learners reading performance to investigate the effectiveness of CLS on reading comprehension achievement of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To this end, a total of 58 intermediate participants studying at a language institution in Ilam city, Iran, aged between 15 to 16 were selected through a proficiency test, and then randomly assigned into two groups of control and experimental (N=29). Totally, four reading comprehension passages were taught for both groups during a semester; the control group received instruction through the traditional way of teaching and the experimental group received instruction through CLS. Both groups took two pre-tests before the instruction and two post-tests after that. Independent samples t-tests were run on the data and the results revealed that participants using CLS outperformed the control group significantly in learning reading comprehension. Hopefully, the findings of this study suggest the pedagogical value of CLS for the teaching of reading comprehension that can be used by EFL teachers, curriculum de signers, and EFL learners.

Keywords:

Reading comprehension , collaborative learning strategy (CLS) , EFL context