A Microgenetic Study Of The Effects Of Self-questioning On EFL Reading Comprehension At College Level

Reading has been widely acknowledged to be a prior language skill in EFL teaching. Since Goodman's psycholinguistic model was posed, reading has been viewed as an interactive process and a cognitive skill rather than a passive and static process. As a result, the focus of reading research has been shifted from the outcome of reading to a description and investigation of the reading process, which gives rise to the issue of reading strategies. In the early stage of reading strategy studies, focus reading strategy instruction was on the description of different strategies used by students with different reading proficiency. In recent years, the focus has been turned to explore some universally effective reading strategies. Research methods applied to reading strategies in early stage were mainly quantitative-oriented. In recent years, research methods in the field of reading strategies have become both quantitative and qualitative.The present study intends to investigate the effects of self-questioning strategy on reading comprehension at college level through a microgenetic study. The results will be significant to both EFL learning and teaching.In Chapter One, the background, motivation and the research questions of studying the use of self-questioning strategy in EFL reading are presented.In Chapter Two, the theoretical frame for the use of self-questioning and the analytical frame for types of questions and reading comprehension were illustrated. Schemata, metacognition and active processing form the basis of using self-questioning. The interdependence of types of questions and reading comprehension form the basis of analyzing the correlations between types of questions students generated in reading and their reading comprehension.In Chapter Three, relevant literature is reviewed. The literature review involves microgenetic study, psychological models of reading comprehension, reading strategies and self-questioning studies.In Chapter Four, the research method is outlined. The strategy training follows the sequence of reading strategy training proposed by Grenfell and Harris (1999). Reciprocal teaching is used to get the subjects to use self-questioning in reading. King's question generic stems are adopted to help the subjects to enhance theirquestioning ability. A microgenetic study is conducted to test the effects of self-questioning in reading by means of repeated measures.In Chapter Five, research questions as well as data analyses will be discussed.In Chapter Six, conclusions will be drawn with regard to the main findings and pedagogical implications as well. The study finds:1. The instruction of self-questioning strategy enhances EFL learners' reading comprehension;2. The low proficiency group benefits most from the self-questioning strategy instruction;3. There are strong correlations between reading comprehension and types of questions generated by students;4. In terms of the development of self-questioning ability, the high and intermediate groups raised higher cognitive questions during the whole process of strategy instruction, but the low group made the greatest progress in questioning ability.The most important pedagogical implication drawn from this study is that EFL students should be trained to form the habit of generating questions in reading so that they will make inferences in the process of reading which are crucial to build up situational models about texts and enhance their reading comprehension.This study is not without limitations. Therefore, some recommendations for future research on self-questioning are put forward at the end of this chapter.