CRITICAL READING 4

REVIEW OF JOURNAL entitled ‘The Effect of Teaching Critical Reading Strategies on EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Retention’ 

by M Khabiri and M. Pakzad (2012), Islamic Azad University.

Research on vocabulary in recent years has done a great deal to clarify the kinds of strategies use in understanding, using, and remembering words. One of the strategies, which has raised many discussions, is acquiring vocabulary through reading. Learning the word’s meaning implies more than comprehending it in a particular text during a reading activity. The words which are related to each other can be easily retained, because using the meaning of words together with the whole meaning of the sentences is the deepest level of processing and ensures the best retention. One kind of such strategies is critical reading strategies.

This research was an attempt to investigate whether teaching critical reading strategies had any significant effect on English learners’ vocabulary retention. The researcher divided the class into experimental group and control group. Reading texts was taught to both groups with the only difference that the experimental group was taught critical reading strategies while in the control group the common comprehension-based approach was applied. The result is that the data strongly suggested that teaching critical reading strategies can increase the intermediate learners’ vocabulary retention.

Critical reading demands the reader to make judgments about what they read. The students have to read a text not only reflectively but also in a skeptical and analytical way, and then they judge the value of the text critically. The steps include previewing, contextualizing, questioning, reflecting, outlining and summarizing, evaluating an argument, and comparing and contrasting related readings.

In my opinion, one reason for obtaining a better result in the critical reading group might have been that critical reading activities made it easier and more fun for the students to retain the target vocabularies. The teacher should use a critical reading strategies in group discussions of vocabulary learning. Through the group discussion, students can profit from social interactions under guidance or in collaboration. The activities in group discussion should have the sense of  involvement and enjoyment, because students spent a long time dealing with each text. Reading critically involves a wide range of cognitive processes, such as comprehension, analysis, and evaluation of the text. Therefore, it needs an enjoyment situation of vocabulary learning.