| The study aims to investigate the effects of effective reading strategies including cognitive, metacognitive strategies and schema for improving EFL reading comprehension of technical college students in Taiwan.; Four purposes are stated in this study. The first is to examine students' ability to apply their schema to English reading comprehension. The second is to examine students' attitudes toward the traditional grammar-translation method and the interactive reading processing approach (bottom-up and top-down processing). The third is to identify effective reading strategies that Taiwanese technical college students prefer to use. The fourth is to identify the relationship among schema, effective reading strategies, graphic organizers, reading metacognition, and reading comprehension. In addition to the above purposes, selection of appropriate teaching materials for students' needs and their preference of English reading methods were also taken into consideration.; This study involved an analysis of data gathered from three research methods: (1) Experimental instruction: Instruct participants using the designed course "Windows on American Culture" and effective reading strategies including graphic organizers for about four months (from September to December in 2004, 100 minutes per week); (2) Evaluation: Pretests and the posttests of reading comprehension tests (Jane Goodall and GEPT) for the course "Windows on American Culture" to examine the growth of the participants' reading comprehension; (3) Two sets of questionnaires: "Checklist of Effective English Reading Strategies" for identifying the participants' preference of using effective English reading strategies and the English Reading Comprehension Questionnaire for the Four-year Program College Freshmen at Ta Hwa Institute of Technology (ERCQ) for examining the participants' perceptions of and attitudes toward EFL reading comprehension.; The participants were from two College English classes assigned to an experimental group with 50 freshmen and a control group with 52 freshmen in a four-year program at Ta Hwa Institute of Technology in north Taiwan.; The participants of both groups were given the designed course, "Windows on American Culture," and effective English reading strategies training by the team teaching between the researcher and another instructor for about four months from September to December in 2004. Handouts about reading strategies were distributed to the participants of both groups. Reading strategies were limited in the course as the following: asking one's self questions, distinguishing fact and opinion, finding main ideas, making a story outline, making a time line, making inferences, paraphrasing, predicting, previewing, reading for specific information, scanning, summarizing, taking notes in a chart, using context, writing margin notes, using 6 Wh-questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how, and making graphic organizers. The experimental group was instructed by the researcher with the interactive reading processing approach and another instructor taught the participants of the control group with the traditional grammar-translation method instead of the interactive reading processing approach. |
