The Instructional Efficacy of Strategy-based Instruction via Electronic Portfolio Assessment in Improving Reading Proficiency of Iranian Intermediate EFL Students

Abstract

This article tries to explore the instructional efficacy of strategy-based instruction via electronic portfolio assessment (Web plus CD-ROM) in improving reading proficiency of Iranian intermediate EFL students. To do so, from the population of male EFL learners studying English at a language institute in Esfahan, a sample of 60 was selected by administrating a Nelson Proficiency Test (Nelson, 1976) to ensure that they are homogeneous in terms of language proficiency. Afterwards, the participants were divided into three equal groups; namely, two experimental and one comparison group. The comparison group was taught using traditional methods of teaching reading comprehension and the experimental groups were taught using four reading strategies (highlighting a text, parsing sentences by putting slashes (/) into sense units, using visual aids and pictures to understand the outline of a text, and drawing cluster diagrams to link the ideas within the text to understand the whole text). After the treatment, a posttest was administered. The mean scores of the comparison and both experimental groups on the posttest revealed that language learners’ mean score in the experimental groups was significantly higher than language learners’ mean score in the comparison group. This means that reading instruction, which was strategy instruction, was more effective in improving readers’ reading proficiency. Another goal of this study was investigating the instructional efficacy of electronic portfolio assessment while using reading strategies. A weblog was designed to collect the participants’ tasks to be shown to their classmates to see the result of strategy training, using the strategies, and the progress of the participants during the study. To sum up, the results of this article state that foreign language pedagogy, especially for adult and young adult English learners, would reap the benefits of the inclusion of explicit and direct strategy instruction within electronic portfolio assessment.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n2s1p476