The Evaluation of an Approach to Teaching Critical Reading

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The purpose of this action research study is to determine whether the approach to critical reading utilized by the researcher in classroom practice is a positive affective factor in the development of higher order reading skills displayed by students in class. A test group and a control group were utilized in the study and reading effectiveness was compared based on performance on two reading texts.
Initial results indicate that the approach seems to be a positive affective factor resulting in a higher level of successful measured performance by the test group over the control group.
Students are foreign language users in an engineering school in the UAE. As part of their studies they are involved in a two- level Communication programme. These are English-medium courses which aim to meet the objectives of producing well-rounded, autonomous life-long learners who are able to use higher order thinking and communication skills required by engineering professionals.
Reading generally and the development of what are commonly called higher order reading skills (HORS) continues to be a concern in the context of secondary and tertiary education (Alverman 1987, Barfield 1999, AIR 2006 Report). While these studies focused specifically on native English speaker students, reading in a foreign language presents a yet more complex set of difficulties (Bensoussan 1990, Taguchi and Gorsuch 2002, Yoo 2006).
The students involved in this study need to be effective critical readers in the programme as they are involved in lengthy and complex primary research projects. Further, the institutional reading load is generally high. Effective approaches to teaching critical reading are therefore of obvious importance.

Stream: Literacy, Language, Multiliteracies; Languages Education and Second Language Learning

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

David Dalton was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a senior lecturer in Communications at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi and has eighteen years experience of teaching, curriculum design and educational management in tertiary institutes in the UK, Spain, Mexico and the UAE. Current research interests are the development of higher-order reading skills and universal learning concepts. Other interests are raising his daughter Yunuen, and writing poetry and songs. His basic belief about teaching and learning is that the death of methodology would be no bad thing.