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Teaching Reading Comprehension in a Creative Way

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Contacts and Contrasts in Educational Contexts and Translation

Part of the book series: Second Language Learning and Teaching ((SLLT))

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Abstract

The paper is aimed at investigation of some aspects of foreign language reading comprehension, which is perceived as the most important skill required by students in a foreign language context. Intensive reading, also known as creative reading, has recently been ignored by researchers. The skill of reading comprehension is an aspect of practical reading experiences which can be developed by teacher’s intervention. One way to help learners to improve the skill is a strategy instruction. In the paper, the effect of various strategies, namely summarizing and students-generated questions are discussed. The participants of the research were upper-intermediate English University students from the Translatology Department. Firstly, overall achievement in a reading comprehension test was analysed; secondly the achievement in the subtests was investigated. Moreover, the research interest was focused on the item difficulty and achievement in comprehension of particular items. The method of a descriptive analysis was applied; frequency tables for categorized data together with quantiles were used to describe distribution of items. The results showed that text comprehension of the subtest 2 affected the other one in the subtest 3. Students comprehension difficulties need to be followed up with separate theory-based assessment tools which can help teachers determine learners’ problems in a more differentiated approach.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English and American studies, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, 1, Tr. A Hlinku, 949 74, Nitra, Slovakia

    Katarína Chválová

  2. Department of German studies, Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, 1, Tr. A Hlinku, 949 74, Nitra, Slovakia

    Eva Stranovská

Authors
  1. Katarína Chválová
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  2. Eva Stranovská
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Correspondence to Katarína Chválová .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Philology, State University of Applied Sciences in Konin, Konin, Poland

    Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk

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Chválová, K., Stranovská, E. (2019). Teaching Reading Comprehension in a Creative Way. In: Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (eds) Contacts and Contrasts in Educational Contexts and Translation. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04978-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04978-2_6

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04978-2

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