Analyzing Reading Comprehension Strategies in Farsi Textbook of Sixth Grade: A Socio-psycholinguistic Approach

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Authors
M. Ghonchepour 1
Z. Ahmadypooranary 1
J. Khidadadi Isfijar 2
1 Assistant Professor of Language and Persian Literature, Farhangian University, Tehran, Iran
2 Educational Department of Kerman (Mahan);
10.48311/LRR.15.4.201
Abstract
Reading is a complicated process that employing comprehension strategies helps learners have more interaction with text to understand it better. The aim of this descriptive-analytic study is investigating Farsi textbook of sixth grade in elementary school based on three activating background knowledge, cultivating vocabulary and verifying strategies and their 26 techniques. It is performed by focusing on Anderson's socio-psycholinguistic approach (1994 & 2012) to be clarified the book's correspondence with its cognitive, metacognitive and compensatory strategies. For this purpose, 79 techniques were collected from all texts and tasks including reading comprehension, perception and conception, interpretation and comprehension, linguistic and literary knowledge, game and listen and say based on researcher-made checklist. Data analysis shows that although all strategies are used, frequency and variation of techniques are low and its content is inconsistent with this model. Organization of chapters into lessons with various titles and sections like read and memorize, tale, read and think, listen and say attracts learners' interests. Various techniques in teaching vocabularies, working with classmates to extend reading skill, teaching vocabulary in connection with other language activities, explicit teaching of vocabularies, teaching vocabulary independent of other language activities, lexical schemes, conceptual relationships, remembering and exercises following these techniques have not been used. Data of verifying principle showed that more attention is paid to metacognitive strategies. Using various texts and techniques relating to remembering previous knowledge are the advantages and not paying attention to group exercises to support the critical thinking of learners are the drawbacks of the book's content.



1. Introduction

Reading holds an essential function in learning a language and is a tool to be informed of the views and thoughts of others. Due to the useful information that people get through this learning skill, the knowledge and their level of awareness increase. Reading is also a purposeful and conceptual skill in which the reader processes the text actively by employing the previous background knowledge and other acquired skills. The PIRLS studies show that the reading literacy of students in elementary schools of Iran is reducing. Regarding the significant role of textbooks in helping elementary students achieve reading abilities, the aim of this study is to investigate the Farsi textbook of 6th grade (Ghassempour Moghaddam et al., 2020) to be informed of its strengths and weaknesses. It lets the curriculum planners use efficient strategies to improve the quality of reading teaching.

 As reading comprehension strategies in this textbook have not been studied from new and communicative models such as the socio-psycholinguistic approach, it is required to do a study to clarify the frequency and nature of reading strategies in Farsi book of sixth grade to present the method(s) to improve the book's content and codification. As such, in this analytic-descriptive study, all Farsi elementary books are considered as the population and the book of sixth grade as a sample. Seventy-nine strategies were extracted from this sample and then they were analyzed. The corpus was taken based on the researcher-made checklist concerning activating background knowledge, cultivating vocabulary, and verifying strategies of all text and exercises about socio-psycholinguistic approach. The descriptive and inferential statistics (non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis H test) were used to analyze the data. The authors of the textbook sixth grade maintain that this book compared to fourth and fifth grades pays more attention to critical reading and is representative of this educational period, therefore it is studied based on Anderson's communicative approach (1994 & 2012) to be determined and clarified its conformity with this model, its content quality to facilitate the learning process.

Research Questions

This study investigates the reading strategies used in Farsi book of sixth grade to answer the following questions:

1- To what extent do the materials and content of the Farsi textbook of sixth grade correspond to Anderson's socio-psycholinguistic theory?

2- Which strategy (ies) of this model has the most frequency in this book?

3- What are the advantages and drawbacks of the Farsi textbook of sixth grade based on Anderson's socio-psycholinguistic approach?

The following hypotheses are introduced for the mentioned questions:

1- The materials and content of the Farsi textbook for sixth grade correspond to Anderson's socio-psycholinguistic theory.

2- Cultivating vocabulary holds the most frequency of all strategies.

3- Employing a variety of titles for lessons and the same exercises is respectively of this book's strengths and drawbacks.



2. Literature Review

The important studies that have been done by Iranian and non-Iranian researchers are mentioned here.



2.1. Studies done in Iran

Ghaffari (2011) in a study titled teaching reading based on Anderson (1994) expressed that the socio-psycholinguistic approach is an efficient model for Persian teaching and it has also an effect on language learners' motivation. Sahrayi and Shahbaz (2012) investigate the books of learning Persian (Zolfaghari et al., 2008) and Persian language collection (Saffarmoqaddam, 2007). They stressed that cultivating vocabulary strategies has the most frequency in these books. Mirdehghan et al., (2013) indicate that Anderson's Model (1994) increases reading comprehension and knowledge. The findings of Safarmoqaddam and Ahadi (2015) showed that this theory was the most systematic approach that has a role in teaching Persian.



2.2. Studies done outside of Iran

Goodman (1976) in a study titled as reading, a psycholinguistic guessing game specified that employing the background knowledge modifies reading into a natural process. The findings of Dechant (1991) also showed that the corresponding of new information with the old one done in the socio-psycholinguistic model leads to better comprehension. Landberg (1993) refers to motivation growth while using metacognitive strategies. The discoveries of Mckeown (2002), Nation, (2001), and Schmitt (2010) explained the important role of vocabulary in listening, writing, and speaking skills.  James (2007) and Torres and Constain (2009) demonstrated that interactional models play an essential role in reading comprehension. They also addressed that learners were interested in using question-answering, summary, explanation, and prediction strategies compared to contrasting and conceptual maps in reading comprehension. The findings of Stoller et al., (2013) revealed that using new vocabularies and their analyses and categories are efficient techniques in vocabulary learning.



3. Theoretical Framework

Reading is an important skill in elementary school as the various social, instructional, cultural, psychological, and linguistic factors play a role in its acquisition (Seraj et al., 2022). Therefore, the study of reading comprehension from interactional multi-dimensional approaches can help recognize the challenges of this skill and remove its obstacles to improve the comprehension and literacy of students. As such, this study is done based on socio-psychological approach (Anderson, 1994, 2012), the theory in which text meaning is a reciprocal process between reader and text and the reader understands the meaning through interaction with the text.

 In this trichotomy approach, the relationship between the reader and the text is done through social, psychological, and linguistic sections. In the language part, reading comprehension is done based on readers' language experience. The psychological section refers to language at the cognitive level and its analytic-combinational. The sociological part is the readers' nonlinguistic contextual knowledge in reading comprehension. The six strategies in this model are: activating prior knowledge, cultivating vocabulary, teaching for comprehension, increasing reading rate, verifying strategies, and evaluating progress. Teaching comprehension has three sides of instructional content, teacher and students. Activating prior knowledge, cultivating vocabulary, and verifying strategies are related to the instrument of instructional content that is studied.



3.1. Activate Prior Knowledge

 Anderson (1994, pp.178-179) believes that activating prior knowledge facilitates comprehension and reading skills. Using semantic mapping and brainstorming, pictures, and asking questions on text subjects before reading activates prior knowledge.



3.2. Cultivate Vocabularies

 Direct techniques of vocabulary teaching through parts of speech, word type of unknown word context, discussing unknown words, teaching words along or separate from other language activities such as knowing the spelling rules, analyzing word structure, memorizing, paraphrasing, attention to context, using various techniques and predicting the morphological, syntactic and semantic features of words help learners to extend their vocabularies (Anderson, 2014, p.181).



3.3. Verify Strategies

 Anderson (1994, pp.185-187) explains that continuous verifying of reading strategies and methods are the most important techniques for reading comprehension. He categorizes this strategy into the three cognitive, metacognitive, and compensatory strategies as below:

 a) Cognitive strategies: They are related to the processing of text through thought. Examining the theme, predicting the content, analyzing the expressions into their smaller parts, and summarizing belong to this strategy.

b) Metacognitive strategy: It is the conscious application of knowledge for compensating the text. Thinking aloud, oral reports, introducing related words, working with classmates, and reviewing the previous knowledge belong to this strategy (ibid, 186-188).

c) Compensatory strategies: They are employed to compensate for the other deficient strategies. Team reading in groups of two or three individuals, various reading texts, using physical activities and hot chairs belong to this strategy.



4. Methodology

This study is a descriptive-analytic research from the methodology point of view. In terms of objective, it is practical research. It aims to analyze the reading strategies in Farsi’s book for grade six in elementary school based on a socio-psycholinguistic model of Anderson (1994 & 2012). The population of this study includes all Farsi books of the second period of elementary school and the Farsi book of sixth grade is its sample. The instrument is a research-made checklist codified based on Anderson's (1994, 2012) model. It includes 3 strategies, 26 techniques, and 7 sub-techniques.  The book is analyzed according to this checklist and the extent of its correspondence was clarified quantitatively. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis H test was employed to compare the strategies employed in this book.



5. Results

The results showed that activating prior knowledge, cultivating vocabulary, and verifying strategies were used in this textbook. However, the frequency and variety of these techniques were low. Among the techniques of activating prior knowledge, only semantic mapping was used for 10.29%. Teaching without considering other activities, memorizing, and paying attention to words' context are the techniques of cultivating vocabulary strategy used for 10.08%. The verifying strategy techniques used in this book were 23.52%. They include focusing on grammar, understanding the theme, analyzing the theme, summarizing, thinking aloud individually and thinking aloud in groups of two or three persons, text varieties, oral reports, working with classmates, and reviewing previous knowledge. Although the frequency and technique varieties of verifying strategies were more than the other two strategies, its low frequency indicates that it does not correspond with the interactional model of reading comprehension.

Among the employed techniques, semantic mapping, teaching vocabulary without language activities, text varieties for thinking aloud, and reviewing prior knowledge were the most frequent ones in this book. Long chapters are organized into short lessons with various titles making learners make less effort and cause more encouragement to read texts. Introducing chapters or lessons without expressing their aims makes lessons have no meaningful relation with each other. Using only comprehension questions gets exercises to be introduced without variety. Moreover, the following techniques have not been seen all over this book: teamwork to do exercises, variety in teaching vocabulary, direct word teaching, and work with classmates to extend reading comprehension ability.



6. Conclusion

As textbooks are important instruments in the teaching-learning process in helping teachers to reach instructional objectives and providing mental practices and knowledge for students, the reading comprehension strategies in Farsi’s book of sixth grade based on the socio-psycholinguistic theory of Anderson (1994, 2012) were studied. The findings are:

1- Activity prior knowledge, cultivate vocabulary and verify strategies have low frequency and variety. Generally, the content of this book regarding these strategies does not correspond with this approach. This finding is contrary to the first hypothesis.

2- Although verifying strategies are more frequent compared to activating background knowledge and cultivating vocabulary, this book in applying this strategy is not successful. This finding is also against the second hypothesis.

3- The structure of chapters and lessons are organized in a way that encourages readers to read the book while employing exercises without variety and using chapters and lessons without introducing their objectives making lessons have no relation with each other causing learners' motivation to be reduced. This finding is in agreement with the third hypothesis

Keywords

Subjects

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Language Related Research
Volume 15, Issue 4 - Serial Number 82
September and October 2024
Pages 201-235