General English course at Iranian universities has always been a controversial issue since the students taking this course are rather weak in English proficiency and need more authentic instructions based on accurate ...General English course at Iranian universities has always been a controversial issue since the students taking this course are rather weak in English proficiency and need more authentic instructions based on accurate need analysis. The materials applied in this course are mainly focused on reading comprehension. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to improve General English university students＇ main sub-skills of reading comprehension and see the effect of the possible changes in terms of time and the fields of study of the students. To do this, 168 university students taking General English course at university of Bojnord, including humanities, engineering, physical education, and sciences, received instruction on the main sub-skills of reading comprehension after taking a pre-test sample TOELF section of reading comprehension. After 16 sessions of 90 minute instruction, they took the post-test section of TOEFL sample of reading comprehension. Mixed between within subject analysis of variance was used to assess the impact of instruction for the four groups of students from pre-test to post-test. The findings of the study indicated that the effect of instruction in terms of time, from pre-test to post-test, and the interaction of time and fields of study were significant. Besides, changes for 10 sub-skills were the same among the four fields of study.展开更多
文摘General English course at Iranian universities has always been a controversial issue since the students taking this course are rather weak in English proficiency and need more authentic instructions based on accurate need analysis. The materials applied in this course are mainly focused on reading comprehension. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to improve General English university students＇ main sub-skills of reading comprehension and see the effect of the possible changes in terms of time and the fields of study of the students. To do this, 168 university students taking General English course at university of Bojnord, including humanities, engineering, physical education, and sciences, received instruction on the main sub-skills of reading comprehension after taking a pre-test sample TOELF section of reading comprehension. After 16 sessions of 90 minute instruction, they took the post-test section of TOEFL sample of reading comprehension. Mixed between within subject analysis of variance was used to assess the impact of instruction for the four groups of students from pre-test to post-test. The findings of the study indicated that the effect of instruction in terms of time, from pre-test to post-test, and the interaction of time and fields of study were significant. Besides, changes for 10 sub-skills were the same among the four fields of study.
