The Effect of Teaching Critical Reading Strategies on Advanced Iranian EFL Learners' Vocabulary Retention

The core interest of this study was to investigate whether teaching critical reading strategies had any significant effect on advanced EFL learners' vocabulary retention. In order to make a homogenous sample, 96 language learners in an English institute in Sari were invited to participate in a paper-based TOEFL test. Finally, 48 of them regarded as advanced EFL learners were selected to participate in the study. The instrument employed in the study included five critical reading comprehension texts selected from Critical Reading Workbook for the SAT (2006) by Green and Weiner and one supplementary material from Cambridge IELTS7. After the pretest had been administered, advanced EFL learners had 8 sessions of explicit teaching and practicing the critical reading strategies such as annotating, questioning, summarizing, and inferencing. Then, they had their posttest and finally the mean scores of pre and post-test critical reading were compared through Paired samples t-test which led to the rejection of the null hypothesis. At the end of the instruction, Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) was administered with the repeated measures designed to measure the retention of inferred meanings after an interval of 2 weeks. By applying one way ANOVA, the researcher could claim that there was a significant difference between VKS pre-test and VKS immediate posttest, and there was no significant difference between VKS immediate and VKS delayed post-test. The participants' knowledge remained largely the same during the two weeks interval. Therefore, teaching critical reading strategies affirmed to have a significant effect on advanced EFL learners' vocabulary retention. Index Terms--critical reading, critical reading strategies, vocabulary retention