Facilitating Reading Comprehension among Engineering Students: Acquiring Successful Strategies

The present study aimed at finding out the effect of two different methods of reading instruction, namely, the traditional grammar translation method and reading comprehension strategies on improving the reading comprehension of Iranian engineering students. The participants included 40 male and female Iranian university students majoring in chemistry that randomly divided into two groups of experimental and control. The participants in the experimental group were taught their textbooks focusing on reading comprehension strategies, while the participants in the control group were exposed to the conventionally-used grammar-translation method. Having run 10 sessions of instruction, the performances of the two groups were compared with each other by an independent-samples t-test to find possible differences between the two groups. The findings were indicative of the effective role of reading comprehension strategies on the reading comprehension of Iranian university students. Key words: ESP; Reading Comprehension Strategies; English for Engineering Students