The Impact of Interrogative and Declarative Advance Organizers on Iranian EFL
Learners’ Comprehension of ESP Reading Tasks
Rezaie, Alhwern( Amir)
Iran University of Science &Technonology
Email: [email protected]
Hosseini, Mehdi
Azad University of Saave
Email:[email protected]
In the field of language learning, students are confronted with a great deal of reading tasks in the foreign
language. Reading tasks mostly seem challenging to students. Teachers can reduce this anxiety by giving
some highlighting previous knowledge at the outset before starting reading tasks. It would make them
approach a reading task well equipped.
By considering the importance of reading ESP texts and by considering the importance of advance
organizer in doing reading tasks, in the following study an effort was made to study the effect of
interrogative and declarative advance organizers on EFL learners’ comprehension of ESP reading tasks.
The subjects selected were 64 university students studying Electronics in Iran University of Science &
Technology. They were divided into 2 equal groups. In the first group, before doing reading tasks the
teacher told the summary of the major events declaratively in statement form. In the second group, the
same summaries were presented interrogatively in question forms before doing reading comprehension
tasks. Both of the groups went through identical procedures but for the kind of advance organizer.
After analyzing the data, the result revealed that the second group ( interrogative condition) with p<0/5
and t= 2.8 differed significantly from the first group.
By considering the fact that observed T-value was more than the critical value, we concluded that
interrogative advance organizer is more effective than the declarative one in improving reading
comprehension.
Introduction
Since World War II English has turned to the most widespread medium of
communication. ESP has been an ever-expanding topical matter due to the international
role the English has been playing for decades.( Hutchinson & Waters, 1987; Robinson,
1991).
The growing international importance of ESP has increased the demand for
understanding ESP. In a country like Iran one of the most important skills for those who
study English for specific purposes is , we dare say, comprehending ESP texts. Reading
comprehension is an interactive process between the reader and the text. Reader should
fit the clues in the text to his background knowledge (Adams & Collins, 1979; Davies, F.,
1995).In the case that students don’t have the necessary background knowledge, teacher
can introduce them to the subject by the time they undertake the learning task i.e. by
advance organizer teachers can fill any gap between student’s knowledge and content
( Brown, H.G., 2001; Nuttall, C. 1996 )
Advance organizers are complex sets of ideas or concepts given to the learner before
the material to be learnt presented. It is meant to provide stable cognitive structure to
which the new learning can be anchored. David Ausubel (1963) coined this usage of
advance organizes in the (1960) by insisting that students significantly profited from a
teacher’s brief verbal explanation of principles plus organization of materials prior to
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reading for comprehension. In supporting his theory of meaningful learning, which says
that in order to learn meaningfully the newly learned information must be subsumed or
anchored into existing cognitive structure ,or else, no learning would take place.
Following this, the theorists have extended this principle into different aspects of foreign
language teaching. The use of relevant introductory materials to facilitate comprehension
and retention of L1 and L2 texts is supported by classroom research.
In this study, we have tried to study the effect of declarative versus interrogative
advanced organizer in reading comprehension. In the second one the advance organizer is
given in the question form to let the students think about the content of reading passage,
but in the latter, declarative form, a short summary of reading passage in the form of
statements is given to students before reading task. Most of the researches done in this
field have been in declarative form. In most of the cases a previous presentation of an
anchoring framework such as pictures, key words, links and statements are given to the
students briefly of what would come next without letting the students think themselves.
What differentiate the present study from others done on advance organizer is that an
attempt has been made to use interrogative advance organizer beside declarative one. The
underlying assumption was that before giving reading passage, if we let our students
think deeply about the forthcoming reading task, their understanding would be improved
to a large extent. In order to investigate this assumption, in this study, a comparison was
made between declarative and interrogative forms to see which one is more effective in
reading comprehension tasks.
Review of the Literature
Most of the researches done in this field, confirm the importance of advance
organizer in increasing comprehension. A frequently cited study was conducted by
Ausubel in 1960. University students in an experimental group and a control group read a
2005 word paper on the metallurgical properties of plain carbon steel, an unfamiliar
topic. The experimental group received an introductory passage on the topic as an
advance organizer, and the control group, a passage on historically relevant background
material on the manufacture of steel which did function as an advance organizer. The test
scores later indicated that group with advance organizer scored significantly higher than
the non-advance organizer group.
The comparative study using illustrations, brainstorming and questions as advance
organizer in intermediate college German conversation classes was conducted by Herman
U.Teichert (1996). This research compared students’ performance in listening
comprehension when three advance organizer plus video were used as opposed to when
neither advance organizers nor video were used. The participants were 50 English
speaking college students enrolled in three sections of intermediate German conversation.
All three sections used printed material as the primary source for conversation topics.
Students in the experimental group used illustrations, brainstorming and questions as
advance organizers plus video tapes to gain access to the topic and to interact with each
other. Findings showed that students in the experimental group developed superior
listening skills.
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Another study has been done by Mayumi Tsubaki and Keiko Nakayama (1999). They
studied the effect of an advance organizer on the comprehension of a lecture. The lecture
outline, given before lecture, acted as advance organizer. The purpose of the study was to
see whether Japanes students as EFL learners with relative lower English ability for
lecture listening would benefit from the lecture outline or not. The subjects were
randomly assigned either to the experimental group or the control group. The subjects
were told that they would be asked to write what they remembered after they listened to
the lecture. The control group did not receive the outline. The results of this study
suggested that lower proficiency group benefited from the advance organizer but the
higher proficiency group did not. In general the control group which didn’t benefit from
the outline acted worse than the experimental group.
In another study, the effect of advance organizer was investigated in the context of
videos. Herron (1994) investigated the effect of a single advance organizer. She used 10
minute segments produced as listening material for French classes in an American
university. In the experimental group, a teacher read aloud six French sentences which
had been written on the board and outlined major scenes of the upcoming video segments
in chronological order. The subsequent test performance showed that the advance
organizer enhanced students’ comprehension.
The current researcher knows of only one study done on difference between
interrogative versus declarative advance organizer. This study done by Herron and Cole
(1998), was about video viewing. In this study the same level of proficiency were
selected. The first group, control group, before video viewing didn’t receive any advance
organizer. The second group received it declaratively before watching a film. The third
group, too, received advance organizer. The third group, too, received advance organizer
before video viewing but this time in the form of questions. After the experiment the
result showed that the mean score of the students in the declarative group were
significantly higher that the score of the control participants, t= 2.25, p<.01. The mean
score of the interrogative group, too, differed significantly from that of control group, t=
2.10, P<.01. Also, there was no statistically significant difference between mean scores
in interrogative and declarative conditions.
The Study
The present study investigates the effect of interrogative advance organizer in the
form of questions versus declarative advance organizer in reading comprehension. The
assumption of the researcher was that these two forms would produce different results.
The advance organizer that engage students in active discovery will significantly enhance
reading comprehension. The idea is that if the teacher doesn’t tell students directly of the
forthcoming material and create a situation for them to think profoundly about the
reading task themselves, students would be more prepared to embrace reading task and
understand it better.
By considering previously done researches and the above mentioned pre perceived
assumption, the research hypothesis was :
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“ there is no significant difference between reading comprehension of the groups that
receive advance organizer declaratively and interrogatively.”
In order to test it, it was changed into the following null hypothesis. If it was rejected,
the alternative hypothesis(directional) would be supported automatically.
The null hypothesis: “There is no significant difference between two groups”
Method
Participants
The subjects were 64 pre-university students. They were selected according to their
scores in English language course in the previous years. All the subjects were gifted
students and had high scores in the previous year. Out of the four classes 64 students
were selected. These students were randomly divided into two equal groups of 32
students, but at the end of the research two students were excluded because of not
answering any question. All the subjects were male and their first language was Turkey.
This was done to exclude the influence of sex and first language on the result of the
research. There was no difference between two groups. Both groups passed through
similar processes. But first group received advance organizer declaratively in the form of
7 or 8 statements before reading passages. The second group received it in question form.
Material
Four short English passages in the field of electronics were selected. Every passage
had about 5 or 6 multiple-choice reading comprehension questions at the end ( Bidahri, et
al., 1995). The questions were about different topics. On the whole, there were 20
questions. The participants had not read these passages in their course books or anywhere
else. In order to see that these passages were not too difficult for them, the readability of
these four passages by using Fog’s readability formula was calculated. Afterwards the
readability of three passages in course books by using the same formula was computed.
(one passage from beginning, one from middle and one from the end of the book). For
doing this, the mean readability of these passages was calculated. The following result
was acquired:
Fog’s readability formula:
number of word
number of three syllable words
(
)40
number of sentences
nomber of words
The average readability of four passages for current research was 15/28.
The average readability of the passages in the pre-university course book was 16/27.
Since the readability level between the passages in the pre-university course book and
our passages were close enough, no standard deviation was taken for them. The acquired
readability showed that the selected passages for this research were at participants’ level.
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Procedure
After selecting subjects randomly, they were divided into two equal groups. In order
to attribute any difference in the result to the kind of treatment, the procedures of doing
research on both groups were the same except for the kind of advance organizer.
Every subjects in both groups received the same four short passages accompanied
with their multiple-choice questions at the end. Students in every group were supposed to
read those four passages and answer their reading comprehension questions. Before
staring reading task, the first group received some previous knowledge about the content
of every passage declaratively and the second group received this previous knowledge
interrogatively. For the second group the teacher created a framework by posing
questions about the content of the passages. He gave the send group a choice to think
about the content before reading passages. In two sessions the research was done on the
first group. In every session they read two of the passages. Before reading any passage
the teacher read aloud 7 or 8 sentences that summarized, in chronological order, the
major events and content of the passage. Then the students were allowed to read the
passage and answer its questions. The teacher repeated this procedure before reading
every passage, until all the four passages were read and answered by the first group.
Similarly two sessions were dedicated to test the second group. In every session they,
too, received two passages. Again before letting them read every passage, the teacher
read aloud the same 7 or 8 sentences, but this time each declarative statement had been
transformed into Multiple-choice questions with some options. Of course before coming
to the class the teacher had already written the statements and their question form. In the
class, before reading task, he only read them aloud. He didn’t make any indication as to
which of these possibilities was correct. He only made the questions with their possible
answers and then asked the students to read the passage and answer its following reading
comprehension questions. In other words, in the interrogative condition the teacher
encouraged the students in the second group to think what might be contained in the
passage, whereas in the declarative condition the teacher provided statements which told
them what was included in the passage.
Results
After students in both groups answered reading comprehension questions, their answer
sheets were collected and were scored. Since all the passages had 20 questions on the
whole, the teacher calculated the score of every student from 20 and gave one point to
every correct answer.
The scores in every group were calculated separately, then the mean score in every
group was calculated.
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The acquire result showed that the difference between the two groups at P<.05 level of
significance with t= 2.86 was significant, so we can reject the null hypothesis which was:
“ there is no significant difference between two groups”. The alternative hypothesis is
supported automatically. i.e. “There is significant difference between the two groups”.
By considering the fact that the observed T-value was more than the critical value, it
was concluded that the interrogative advance organizer is more effective than the
declarative one in improving reading comprehension.
Discussion and Implications
In the field of language learning, students are confronted with a great deal of reading
tasks. Reading tasks mostly seem challenging to the students. Teachers can reduce the
formidability of task and students’ anxiety by giving some highlighting previous
knowledge at the outset before starting reading tasks. Giving advance organizer will
reduce students’ fear of unfamiliar texts and will make them approach a reading task
well-equipped. As the result of the current study shows, the second group in the
interrogative condition worked significantly better that the first group in the declarative
condition. The result confirms the cognitive notion that an advance organizer that
engages students in active discovery learning will significantly improve comprehension
over didactic exposition. This conclusion can be based on previous classroom research
indicating that students learn a foreign language best when they are engaged to test
hypothesis to learn from their mistakes( Herron & Tomasello, 1992). This implies that if
students are put in a condition that forces them to think about the forthcoming task, they
will understand it better. On the other hand, when the ready-made information about the
forthcoming task is given, less improvement in reading comprehension tasks would take
place.
Shortcoming and suggestions for further research
Although this research was done in a very controlled condition and most of the
interfering variables were tried to be controlled, some shortcomings were inevitable. It is
hoped that other researchers working in this field would consider these points in their
research. In this study the number of subjects were limited. They were all gifted students
that had higher marks in English course in the previous years. The interrogative advance
organizer was effective on these proficient students. The researchers’ assumption is that
if the subjects were not gifted and high-leveled, the result may have been something
different. This is a good topic for future research to study the effect of interrogative
advance organizer on students who are in lower level in English language courses.
Another point needing consideration in this research is that the advance organizers
were given orally in English language to native Turkish speakers. Mostly students in Iran
have problems in understanding English orally and, compared with reading., their
listening comprehension always lags behind. As a result, this point is, also, worth
considering to see in which condition more positive result will be acquired: in written or
oral form.
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