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We’re going to research second language learners’ use of reading strategies in the English classroom and how these affect their performance in reading tasks.

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The classroom we’re going to study belongs to Instituto Nuevo Siglo in the city of General Roca. The class is composed of 18 students studying the fourth and fifth year of secondary school. Students attend lessons on Tuesday and Thursday, from 13:50 pm. to 16 pm. Their proficiency level is B2 even though we could identify different levels among them, which are below the mentioned B2 level. That’s why we claim that it’s a mixed-level classroom. Among the group of students, we can identify energetic and really polite teens. They’re generally willing to participate and interact with each other. Even though they get on really well, there’s a huge variety of interests and abilities.

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We could observe that not all of our students were successful in the reading comprehension tasks. The possible causes that we could identify are, firstly, that it’s a mixed-level classroom, and secondly, the lack of reading strategies among learners. Another possible cause could be the nature of the selected material and its authenticity. There’s a marked lack of available material for teachers.

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The main aims of our project are to research how we can improve our students’ performance in reading comprehension tasks and to design an activity that will be useful to solve that problem.

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We're going to measure our students' use of reading strategies by means of an instrument called SORS (Mohktari & Sheorey 2002). We're going to adapt the survey outlined in the paper to test how much metacognitive awareness our students have. This survey will be carried out after a reading task, which will carry a mark and will be part of the preliminary studies. These are some examples of strategies outlined in Mohktari & Sheorey’s instrument: “I have a purpose in mind when I read” and “I take an overall view of the text to see what it is about before reading it”.

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After gathering data from the reading task and the survey adapted from Mohktari & Sheorey’s (2002), we’re going to analyse two aspects: Firstly, students’ results in the reading task and, secondly, whether students have applied reading strategies or not. So, we’ll obtain information in relation to each student’s reading competence since they’ll get a mark in the reading tasks. In that way, we’ll see the initial status of the students’ reading competence. We predict that the results will not be that successful judging by our experience with this particular group of students. Besides, we’ll have a scheme with the percentages that show how many reading strategies students use and how often they apply them.

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We're going to quote authors that support our claim which says that learners' reading skills will improve by means of explicit instruction of reading strategies. For example, “Teachers must care about the processes involved in reading and studying, and must be willing to devote instructional time to them through direct strategy-instruction and modeling.” (Meena Singhal, 2001). We're also going to read authors like Anderson (2014), who talks about engaged readers and how to help our students improve their reading skills.

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Following some authors mentioned before and regarding our own experience, we’ve come up with some possible solutions. We need to teach reading strategies in an explicit way to promote the students'group metacognitive awareness and self-monitoring skills when it comes to applying these strategies.

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We’re going to carry out a 2-week reading strategies instruction. We’ll offer our students activities that will enhance their awareness of reading and self-monitoring strategies and we’ll encourage students to systematically put those reading strategies into use. To see if the explicit instruction is effective or not, our students are going to carry out another reading task by the end of the teaching-learning sequence. We’re going to compare the new results with the ones recorded at the beginning of the study and we’ll see whether students have improved their performance in the reading task. If they have improved, we’re going to show that the improvement is due to the explicit instruction of reading techniques by means of a checklist in which students will have to choose the strategies they think they’ve applied.  We're going to compare the checklist that had been done by the beginning of the study with the one done after the 2-week instruction has taken place.

Hence, in this stage, students carry out another reading task. After the pre, while and post-reading activities, they will be asked to complete a checklist which includes some statements that reflect reading strategies to see how many of them have been applied after they've been explicitly taught. If students have used these strategies, we're going to compare the effects these have in relation to their overall performance in reading comprehension tasks. Questions to be answered,  "Have students' reading comprehension skills improved in the second reading task?"; "How have the reading strategies affected the results in both cases?" (In both the pre-study and in the implementation).

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Even though an action research project might be considered unachievable because of the fact that it’s a time-consuming activity and that the education system does not provide teachers with the necessary resources to carry it out (materials, money, professionals, seminars, etc), we’ve learnt that whenever a problem arises in the classroom, we can resort not only to our own experience but also to our colleagues’ so as to collaboratively tackle that specific problematic situation and try to find a solution for it. It might be solved in an efficient way once all the steps in the action research project are followed. Action research projects show us that teachers have a pivotal role in students’ lives since they can provide them with tools that will help them to improve not only their performance as ESL students but also their skills needed for the 21-st century world.

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Anderson, N. (2014). Developing engaged second language readers. En Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language.

Meena Singhal. (2001, 1 April). Reading proficiency, reading strategies, metacognitive awareness and L2 readers. In The Asian EFL Journal. https://www.asian-efl-journal.com/articles/singhal/

Mokhtari, K. & Sheorey, R. (2002, January). Measuring ESL students’ awareness of reading strategies. Research Gate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285641803_Measuring_ESL_students'_awareness_of_reading_strategies