Christina Gkonou
IELTS reading is a great challenge faced by many international students who wish to get a good test score that will allow them to study in British universities. This presentation focuses on in-progress action research into teaching reading strategies for IELTS to a group of intermediate students. A typology of strategies was created by the teacher, using suggestions from the literature, prior to setting the first reading task. For the first task, students were asked to think aloud while working on it and write down their thoughts and justification for the use of any strategies. The writings were collected and analysed through qualitative coding, and the coding scheme including strategies used by students was compared and contrasted to the existing literature. Reading strategies were then discussed in class. A reflective teacher diary was kept by the researcher throughout the period of conducting action research, including comments on the effectiveness of teaching IELTS reading strategies, the efficiency of the research instruments, the improvement on students’ scores, and the impact of action research on the actual teaching. A questionnaire asking students to state how often and why they used each strategy was administered to them, accompanying the second task. The procedure was repeated another ten times, each time administering a slightly adapted version of the initial questionnaire based on the students’ comments in their think-aloud writings. A reflective essay will be written by students at the end of the course, and all data will be merged at this stage.
Video of 3 minute talk, and photo of poster below: Back to Teachers Research! home
IELTS reading is a great challenge faced by many international students who wish to get a good test score that will allow them to study in British universities. This presentation focuses on in-progress action research into teaching reading strategies for IELTS to a group of intermediate students. A typology of strategies was created by the teacher, using suggestions from the literature, prior to setting the first reading task. For the first task, students were asked to think aloud while working on it and write down their thoughts and justification for the use of any strategies. The writings were collected and analysed through qualitative coding, and the coding scheme including strategies used by students was compared and contrasted to the existing literature. Reading strategies were then discussed in class. A reflective teacher diary was kept by the researcher throughout the period of conducting action research, including comments on the effectiveness of teaching IELTS reading strategies, the efficiency of the research instruments, the improvement on students’ scores, and the impact of action research on the actual teaching. A questionnaire asking students to state how often and why they used each strategy was administered to them, accompanying the second task. The procedure was repeated another ten times, each time administering a slightly adapted version of the initial questionnaire based on the students’ comments in their think-aloud writings. A reflective essay will be written by students at the end of the course, and all data will be merged at this stage.
Video of 3 minute talk, and photo of poster below: Back to Teachers Research! home
