The Effect of Stimulated Recall on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

The present article was conducted on Iranian intermediate EFL learners (female) at Zabangostar Institude in Boroujerd, Iran. It used stimulated recall as an introspective/retrospective method to determine whether it affects students’ reading comprehension or not by using audio recordings of participants in action, which they were later shown to use as a prompt and asked to reflect on. Samples were selected after homogenizing the students by the use of validated Oxford Placement Test. Therefore, 20 homogeneous participants were chosen. The paper used single-group time-series design. So the researcher gave 6 short reading texts which were selected randomly from intermediate select reading [1] to the participants. The experiment was done in 12 sessions. The participants read the reading text and gave their comments while their voices were being recorded by the researcher to obtain the first data (corpus 1). The next session, the researcher sent their voices by an application (SHAREit) to everyone’s Tablet so that they could listen to their own voices privately by headset and gave their comments again while they were being recorded again to obtain the second data (corpus 2) . The researcher made an outline of the main and subordinate sentences of the selected texts and numbered the sentences in order to have a measurement to score the participants. The participants were scored objectively by the number of the main and subordinate ideas which they referred to. Based on the data analysis, the researcher found the significant effect of stimulated recall on reading comprehension regarding both main and subordinate ideas. Consequently, the null hypotheses of the research were rejected.

Keywords:

Stimulated Recall , Introspective Method , Reading Comprehension , Metacognitive Awareness , Reading Process , Reading , Noticing