Effects of Prereading Activities on EFL Reading by Brazilian College Students

This study investigated the effects of three prereading activities (pictorial context, vocabulary preteaching, and prequestioning) and a control condition on the reading comprehension of 40 undergraduate Brazilian EFL students. In a Latin square design, all subjects read four different reading passages, each passage under one of the four conditions. Immediately after reading a passage, subjects answered an 8-item open-ended test and a 10-item multiple-choice test. Multivariate analysis of variance tests on the two measures revealed significant effects for prereading and passage. Further investigation through Tukey's HSD revealed that all three prereading activities produced significantly higher multiple-choice scores than the control condition. Vocabulary preteaching resulted in increased comprehension compared with the control but was significantly less effective than the other two strategies. Results of the study are interpreted through a schema-theoretic view of the reading process.

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