Improving Reading Comprehension through Extensive Reading- the case of WCU 2nd year English Majoring students

Abstract

This study was designed to improve students’ reading comprehensions through extensive reading. In other words, it was intended to identify to what extent students’ reading comprehension is affected through extensive reading strategy in English as a Second or Foreign Language classrooms. Particularly, it was attempted to (a) identify the effect of extensive reading strategy on reading comprehension of English majoring students. Moreover, it was proposed (b) to identify which reading strategy (i. e. extensive or intensive) that learners use more frequently so as to improve their reading comprehension. In the classroom, there were 38 students who were taking courses. There was only one section: 2^nd year English majoring students in the university. Test and re-test that need extensive reading strategies was designed and administered to 38 students. For this purpose, after assessing the students’ reading comprehension level, the researchers let learners engaged reading short stories, short novels, poems and other texts. Three months training program was designed and delivered accordingly focusing on extensive reading strategy, and they made thorough follow-up of learners’ activities.  After implementation of training, re-test was given focusing on similar texts: short novels, short stories, poems and others. To address the second objective, questionnaire was developed and administered to all the target population.  Subsequently, comparing and contrasting the results of before implementation and after implementation was carried out. Thus, it was identified that extensive reading has a great positive effect on students’ reading comprehension, and intensive reading strategy is most frequently used by the students. So, even though teachers are playing their roles regarding the issues, they have to incorporate more extensive reading texts like short stories, novels, poems and others in teaching reading comprehension in EFL classroom context, and they have to encourage students and make them aware of importance of using extensive reading strategy out of classrooms for better improvement of reading comprehension.