The Effect of Cooperative Reading Strategies on Improving Reading Comprehension of Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners

Reading comprehension is a major component of language learning and finding an appropriate and effective way for teaching it, to be considered by many researchers. However, one effective way for achieving this goal can be used in different activities. The present study will be aimed at investigating the effect of cooperative reading strategies on improving reading comprehension of Iranian Intermediate EFL learners. In order to achieve the objective of the research, 40 learners who participated in this study were chosen from among 60 learners through administrating Nelson test. They were all intermediate learners who were randomly assigned in two groups, one as an experimental group, (G1), and the other as a control group, (G2). Each group consists of 20 learners. Then, in order to establish the homogeneity of two groups a pretest was used. After that, the experimental group received treatment in cooperative reading strategies, the following procedures were used to accomplish the purpose of this study research which each session was three hours. They took active role as code breaker, text participant, text user, text analyst and they used different strategies such as Think, Pair, Share, Round Robin, Roundtable, team jigsaw and number head together during the class. This Cooperative Reading lesson sequence was based on a 16 session cycle. The learners stayed in their teams throughout a cycle to finish reading their passages. The researcher began by encouraging learners to talk about why working together could be helpful and using short texts to start while the teams were reading and discussing their texts the researcher paid attention to the needs of underperforming readers by supporting learners who might need help devising questions to write on notes. At the end of each session, the learners also spent time reflecting on their group processes as well as their individual reading performances. Their responses might be recorded in their journals. After the learners complete their texts; a new cycle begins with new texts. Generally, learners chose a reading. They participated in team building activities and prepared their reading and discussion roster. They then participated in daily cooperative reading sessions. In this part learners could use dictionary to find new words and analyzed the text themselves in group.But the control group received traditional method. One week after the last session both groups received post test in order to check their reading comprehension. Statistical results revealed that the experimental group did much better than control group and consequently cooperative reading strategies were effective on improving reading comprehension of Iranian Intermediate EFL learners