The Effects of QtA on EFL Senior High School Students’ Reading Comprehension and Written Response

• Main Authors: WU SHIHCHUN, 吳詩純
• Other Authors: CHU HSICHIN
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/09556696689274308667

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 102 === This study investigates the effects of an approach to reading instruction, QtA approach, on levels of reading comprehension and on the quantity and quality of written response by EFL senior high school students. Ninety-four eleventh graders, 46 in QtA Group, the Experimental Group, and 48 in Control Group, participated in the study in six sessions during a four-week intervention. For each session, one story was covered in two different approaches for the two groups. QtA Group was taught in QtA Approach, with a focus on clarifying authorial intents and reader initiating questions, while Control Group was guided through traditional question-and-answer approach, with a focus on textual message. Prior to and after teaching intervention, pretest and posttest were implemented. In both tests, students read a passage before they answered reading comprehension questions and performed a written response. Additionally, Experimental Group completed a perception questionnaire in the posttest. Data from reading comprehension questions were analyzed in terms of factual, interpretive, responsive, and incorrect dimensions; data from written response were analyzed by its quantitative measures of words, thought units, and words per thought unit, and by its qualitative features of textual, personal, intellectual and incorrect response. In addition, readers’ preference for, perceived ability growth from, and perceived feasibility of QtA were analyzed based on the data from Perception Questionnaire. With Group as an independent variable, Pretest as a covariate, ANCOVA analyses on Posttest in three types of reading comprehension questions and four levels of written response reveal several significant findings. First, for reading comprehension questions, QtA Group performed significantly better than Control Group in responsive questions but not in factual and interpretive questions, indicating that QtA approach facilitates comprehension at the responsive level. Second, for written response, QtA Group generated more words per thought unit, despite that there was no difference between groups in the text length and the number of thought unit, indirectly reflecting the impact of QtA approach in boosting complexity in thought, albeit not in the quantity of content. This conjecture is further supported by the findings that QtA Group produced more intellectual responses and fewer textual responses and incorrect responses but no different number of personal responses than Control Group. Additionally, the questionnaire analyses point to students’ positive perception towards QtA approach. Students favored, expected the future implementation of, and transferred the use of QtA. These findings suggest that QtA approach can be an effective instructional approach to facilitating EFL high school students’ higher-order thinking not only in reading comprehension but also in written response to reading.