Untrained secondary students’ use of predicting, skimming and scanning in L2 English within the first phase of a reading strategies training programme. Pedagogical implications.

Abstract

This paper presents the results of the implementation in real life of the first phase of our reading strategies training programme: "Preparation" (Criado and Cánovas 2001). The subjects were fifteen sixteen-year-old Spanish native students with a low-intermediate level of English. Our main goal was to implicitly develop their awareness of the strategies of predicting, skimming and scanning by means of two reading activities- requiring the use of these strategies -plus a questionnaire about how they performed the tasks. A mostly ineffective reading originated as a consequence of lack of attention to the reading purpose, unknown topic and unknown vocabulary. These undermined the positive influence of the use (when applicable) of the strategy of predicting. Mainly inadequate background knowledge seemed to account for the activation of a bottom-up processing of reading too. Generally, results appear to indicate that inefficient reading comprehension is both a language and a schemata problem, at least at this level. Pedagogical implications point to explicit instruction on the need to focus on the purpose and strategies to face unknown words (such as inferencing). We also include some suggestions for improvement of future applications of our programme in the light of these findings.