A Linguistic Integrative Model for Enhancing College Students’ English Reading Competence

Abstract

This quantitative correlational research focused on investigating the relationship between linguistic technology-based integrative teaching approaches and college students' reading competence. The study occurred in five phases. The first phase involved observing four reading classes to collect data on teaching methodologies. The second phase was based on identifying the problems that affect students' English reading performance. The researcher selected a random sample of 100 female freshmen students from the College of Languages and Translation at Al-Imam Mohamed Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMAMU Univ.), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The participants responded to a Likert questionnaire regarding their reading problems and strategies. In the third phase, the participants took a reading comprehension exam to determine their exact reading levels. The preliminary data showed the presence of a high degree at the scale of difficulties that students faced in reading comprehension. Students had problems in loud and silent reading, reading speed, and critical and inferential reading, which reflected students' weak reading skills. The study also pointed to the ineffective traditional teaching strategies as the main cause of this problem. Traditional teaching strategies which depend on general lectures and explaining the mechanical structure of the reading passages did not help students use their cognitive abilities to improve their reading comprehension. The fourth phase of the present study required selecting an experimental group of 35 students from the same sample to be taught using the linguistic integrative model for five weeks. At the end of the fifth week, a reading comprehension exam was given to the group to determine the impact of the new teaching methodology on students' reading competence. The comprehension test was adopted from ACCUPLACER, an integrated computer-assessment designed to evaluate students' reading skills. The test is designed by Board College in USA, which is a specialized agency in college students' exams, and it offers diagnostics and intervention support to help students prepare for academic course work. The reading exam covers six skills, including: understanding the text's purpose and tone; identifying the central ideas; recognizing supporting details; understanding sentences and vocabulary relationships; distinguishing illustration, comparison and contrast, and cause and effect relationships; and understanding inferential meanings. The data analysis showed a significant difference in favor of students who used the linguistic integrative model, indicating the positive impact of technology-based teaching approaches on students' proficiency in reading. Based on the results of this study, the researcher made the following recommendations: integrate educational technology into teaching the reading courses at the college; provide professional programs for teachers to train them to use the linguistic integrative approaches; and provide linguistic laboratories that are equipped with modern techno...

Readability in Students’ General English Textbooks: An Empirical Study Based on Benchmark

“…Certainly, students' reading performance is primarily related to their reading competence and comprehensive language proficiency and most of the time reading competence is also a significant indicator of students' language proficiency. However, these abilities are likely to be neither acquired nor improved within a relatively short interval of time before the test (Madkour, 2016). Therefore, the progress in candidates' ST reading performances might owe less to their language abilities than their upgraded learning strategies, test skills, attitudes and among others based on their first unpleasant CET…”

Integrative Approach to Teaching English at University: Sociological Study

“…Internet represents a vast platform which contains the plethora of resources to be used for boosting some separate skills, such as listening [9] or grammar [10] as shown in the corresponding case studies. A few other technologies, such as data mining analysis, were studied by M. Madkour, and it has been displayed that they can be especially significant to improve reading skills [11].…”