Abstract
The study identified how Saudi schoolteachers perceive reading and comprehension. It also investigated the effect of teachers’ willingness and lesson presentation on learners’ achievement. A descriptive approach was used, and the sample consisted of 56 teachers. The lesson plan in Broughton et al.’s study was adopted as a model lesson plan. Respondents’ responses revealed their poor awareness of the most important activities that facilitate or hinder comprehension. Furthermore, teachers’ willingness and readiness to teach reading were not sufficient to yield competent teachers. It concluded that students were not given sufficient time and assigned to cleverly chosen roles to better understand the text. Teachers, however, should reconsider their daily lesson plans through which reading lessons are executed, taking into account students’ culture, interests, feelings, and so forth. Finally, other researchers were recommended to investigate the differences in students’ achievement levels due to the adoption of the lesson plan proposed by Broughton et al.
Keywords
Introduction
Teachers of English as a foreign language everywhere are responsible for developing students’ abilities in various language skills, particularly reading comprehension. Teachers’ awareness of reading and comprehension terms usually allows them to be or deprives them from being brilliant teachers. They often struggle with the reading passages. Reading teachers are often guided by their knowledge of reading process stages and components. Nevertheless, they may not share it with their learners (Hager et al., 2005). As soon as learners realize how others become fluent readers, they can reflect on their own process of improving reading skills. What is noticed inside the classrooms of English as a foreign language proves that teachers are not fully aware of their tasks or roles regarding the terms of reading and comprehension. They intend to teach students comprehension but with useless actions that usually reveal their poor understanding of what reading comprehension implies. Comprehension in Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is defined as “the capacity of mind to perceive and understand.” Reading, however, is explained as “making meaning of print.” Thus, when joining reading to comprehension, the result will be “reading comprehension,” which means “the reader’s capacity to construct and understand” or to “perceive and understand the meanings communicated by texts.” In short, reading comprehension is the reader’s ability to draw meaning from a printed page and interpret the information it contains properly.
Furthermore, most of teachers do not understand that reading inside classrooms is not an end in itself but a process or a means that must arrive at comprehension. Many studies such as Liang and Dole (2006), Wooly (2011), and McKeown and Beck cited in Kesler (2010) nearly have emphasized this fact and asserted the importance of comprehension as a result of reading. These studies agreed on the fact that comprehension is overlooked by all teachers and learners for the benefit of issues related to beginning reading, phonics, and decoding. To avoid being useless, reading teachers have to motivate students to read the text by giving them useful instruction for effective results. They are recommended to be aware of the fact that reading in the classroom has several specific features, which distinguish it from real-life reading. Koleva (2008) mentions four distinctive features of classroom. First, it is time limited where students are limited in the class time and reading activities they have to carry out along with other language skills. Second, the choice of the reading material is not related to students’ interests. Students may not normally choose it to read outside the classroom. The reading material is always more difficult to understand if it is outside their personal taste, experience, and interest. Third, students are not only expected to read the whole text but also required to show their understanding of it by carrying out a number of activities. Fourth, students have to do the required tasks whether or not they like reading it.
In brief, teachers of English as a second or foreign language are required to encourage and train their learners to comprehend, interpret, integrate, criticize, infer, analyze, connect, and evaluate ideas in texts. Learners need to negotiate multiple meanings not only in their heads but also in the minds of others. When comprehending, learners strive to process text beyond word level to get to the big picture. When comprehension is successful, learners are left with a sense of satisfaction that they have understood the meaning of a text.
Statement of the Problem
Teachers’ proficiency to comprehend the reading texts appropriately affects producing proficient readers at schools. Reading teachers have to understand that they only succeed in doing their jobs just when comprehension transfers the learner to a new level of active understanding and insight and when comprehension enhances language and vocabulary knowledge. Teachers need to understand that their poor language skills and mainly reading make them fail in their academic experience and, in turn have poor life outcomes. Later on, when these learners join upper elementary and middle school years, they find themselves in critic situations. They, for instance, cannot handle the text demands of the curriculum in order to work and learn independently (Lesaux & Kieffer, 2010). Reading teachers will not be able to help students comprehend the reading passages as well as desired as long as they suffer or strive to do so. Nevertheless, they need to strengthen Learners’ language skills inside classrooms.
Reading teachers, in general and more specifically Saudi ones are noticed facing many difficulties when trying to develop their learners’ comprehension. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate these areas of difficulty that reading teachers and learners often encounter. It will also propose a lesson plan as a model for these teachers and assess its benefits for both parties.
Importance of the Study
Deficiencies in teacher preparation affect not only teachers but also school students. None can assume that badly prepared teachers can invent perfect teaching methods. Weak teachers will not improve students’ language abilities involving the reading skill. This study is hoped to be a serious trial to propose a plan or a teaching model for Saudi English language teachers to adopt and later on adapt in their reading classes. Furthermore, Saudi teachers particularly should be aware of the importance of teaching reading as one of two receptive skills, by which learners can understand what is going around them. Liang and Dole (2006) stress such a fact. The study states that despite the many reports about the importance of comprehension, many teachers are still not well competent of how to do so. Good teachers should always look for more ideas and concrete ways to improve their students’ comprehension skills. Thus, the present study tries to provide teachers with answers to questions such as the following:
What is the best way to teach comprehension?
What can be done for students who can read fluently but do not understand what they read?
What can the reading teacher do to support struggling readers?
Finally, with these preliminary considerations in mind, the present study seeks to attempt something new and more effective in teaching reading comprehension. The model presented and adapted from Broughton, Brumfit, Flavell, Hill, and Pincas (1981) is expected to be of much help for our reading teachers and applicable to students’ needs and levels.
Aims of the Study
The present study aims at investigating the extent to which Saudi English language teachers perceive themselves capable of teaching reading to school students at intermediate stage. It also aims to investigate the weakness areas that prohibit these teachers from being perfect teachers of English in general, and reading comprehension in particular. In other words, the study tries to answer the following questions:
Do Saudi teachers favor reading comprehension classes?
Are Saudi teachers familiar with the main stages of teaching reading?
Are Saudi teachers familiar with the roles of students in each stage of reading?
Are Saudi teachers familiar with the steps to improve learners’ skills of reading comprehension?
Review of Related Literature
Many studies were conducted to enhance the performance of reading teachers and develop the text comprehension of learners. Each study addressed a certain issue for the sake of developing the production of both of teachers and learners. Broughton et al. (1981) talked about three main reading phases through which students can reach text comprehension. They have to recognize the black marks, correlate them with formal linguistic elements, and correlate the resulted words and phrases with meaning. For this sake, loud and silent reading can be followed. In the first, the reader views words or lines of words ahead of his tongue (pronunciation). In the latter, readers focus on finding out information, no matter how accurate or inaccurate their pronunciation is. Their ability to find the required points shows how good or bad readers they are. Comprehension can be reflected in their ability to answer some questions about the content of a text. Higher cognition skills are involved in the third stage with the result that a successful reader should be able to survey, skim, and explain both the text’s content and structure.
Block (1992) and McKeown and Beck cited in Kesler (2010) stressed the actions to be taken by the teachers to help readers explain, elaborate, and connect their ideas. For instance, Block studied the actions that a strategic reader carries out. Three main actions were identified. At first, a strategic reader identifies the purpose and the type of the reading text. He then thinks about the text’s general character and features, that is, he tries to locate a topic sentence and follows supporting details toward a conclusion. After that, he investigates the author’s purpose (while reading it). Then, he chooses, scans, or reads in detail. At last, this strategic reader makes continuous predictions about what will occur next, based on information obtained earlier, prior knowledge, and conclusions obtained within the previous stages. To help reader do so, teachers need to train them to classify, sequence, establish whole-part relationships, compare and contrast, determine cause–effect relations, summarize, hypothesize and predict, infer, and conclude.
Considering teachers and readers’ performance, some factors were found affecting it. Such factors refer to the relations between the teachers’ worries and the readers’ comprehension input as Bang, Muaka, Bernbardt, and Kamil (2003) mentions, on one hand, and to the relation between the reader’s perception and thought when he reads as stated by Konaré (1994), on the other hand. For example, Bang et al. claim that reading consists of two related processes: word recognition and comprehension. Word recognition refers to the process of perceiving how written symbols correspond to one’s spoken language. Comprehension is the process of making sense of words, sentences, and connected text. Readers typically make use of background knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, experience with text, and other strategies to help them understand written text. Children and adults who are learning to read in a language different from their mother tongue will also need to learn about the culture of the second or foreign language. There is a relation between the teachers’ worries and the readers’ comprehension input. Teachers are always worried about the outcomes of the reading text with the result that little attention is paid to the reader’s way of comprehension. The set of procedures that teachers often implement in the reading class is a fruitless caricature. None cares about devoting time for useful training in the process of reading itself. Teachers tend to concentrate on the follow-up activities omitting the actual procedure for reading. In other words, reading classes should be a two-sided track. One should be for the reading process itself while the other should be for the reading product, that is, comprehension. Both sides should receive the same level of importance (Konaré, 1994).
With regard to the definition of reading as a process, Carrell cited in Norris (1994) believes that second language reading is primarily viewed as a decoding process. Singhal (1998) on the other hand looks at reading as an internal process and cannot be observed. Meanwhile, Alyousef (2005) addresses reading as an “interactive” process between a reader and a text. Recognition of the printed letters and words in front of the reader claims Carrell is necessary to understand the main aim of the text by expressing different things such as the author’s intended meaning or tone of speech. In other words, the reader has to do many things to understand the reading passage. He has to pronounce correctly the words in front of his eyes. He has to understand the meanings of new words he encounters for the first time. He has to link ideas and pieces of information together to get comprehension. In conclusion, readers should make the text comprehensible by relating the smaller textual units (letters and words) at the bottom to longer and larger units at the top. None can understand what happens inside the student when he reads. Singhal believes that teachers should exhibit significant efforts in the classroom to find out what characteristics such a hidden process includes. For instance, reading teachers should understand their students’ reading behaviors, on one hand, and open their eyes on these observed behaviors, on the other hand. In brief, nothing comes out of nothing. That is, teachers should be acquainted with factors that have much impact on reading in foreign language such as cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds. Alyousef (2005) argues that the reader interacts dynamically with the text as he or she tries to elicit the meaning and where various kinds of knowledge are being used. Linguistic or systemic knowledge (through bottom–up processing) as well as schematic knowledge (through top–down processing) should be used. Readers need to be familiar with specific components of reading process such as automatic recognition skills, vocabulary and structural knowledge, formal discourse structure knowledge, content/world background knowledge, synthesis and evaluation skills/strategies, and metacognitive knowledge and skills monitoring.
David (1999) discussed the importance of understanding the cultural and societal differences between readers’ mother tongue and English. Readers are assumed to realize the cultural and socio-linguistic differences underlying the communicative behavior of native and nonnative users of English through speech acts. Readers need to distinguish how people of different cultures speak. They have to compare and contrast pragmatic differences between both languages. The teacher should first understand the reading text. As soon as he does so, he can train readers to understand the pragmatic and situational meanings of new and unknown lexis that lead to text comprehension. Comber and Nixon (2011) agree with David regarding the importance of the text significance. The critical reading comprehension is a term used by Comber and Nixon where reading is connected to topics and texts that have political and social significance for readers and their communities. Readers should comprehend both the content and contexts of the texts they read. Coyne et al. cited in Kesler (2010) and Wooly (2011) looked at reading comprehension in a different way. Both studies stressed the benefits of word contextualization, the explicit and contextualized teaching of word meanings as an effective way for increasing young readers’ vocabulary. Such contextualization may increase learners’ abilities to notice and learn unknown words more independently and incidentally. Comprehension, they state, involves understanding, gaining meaning, and text interpretation. It depends on a variety of factors, some of which are reader related, text related, and situation related. Norris (1994) stressed this idea as he mentioned that one of the reasons for the dissatisfaction with readers’ abilities is the readers themselves. Readers mostly engage themselves in laborious, time-consuming, and painful tasks. They get busy in word-by-word text translation when asked to do homework. For language learners to be good readers, they need to be personally involved in the texts, more independent, more motivated, more efficient, and more effective. Good readers, argues Duke and Pearson (2002), are active ones who have clear goals for reading in their minds, and typically look over the text before they read without paying attention to its structure or number of sections. Good readers construct, revise, and question the meanings they make as they read. They try to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words and concepts in the text and draw from, compare, and integrate their prior knowledge with material in the text. They think about the text authors, their style, beliefs, intentions, historical milieu, and make adjustments in their reading as necessary.
Gabrielatos (1998) discusses nearly different things regarding the difficulties faced by reading teachers and readers. The study mentions that English as a foreign language curricula designers play a significant role in the failure or success of both parties. The study claims that English as a foreign language courses concentrate on vocabulary and grammar only and neglect the constitution of the systematic development of reading as a skill. Teachers’ efforts must be maximized to enable learners to use their existing language knowledge. The heavy explanation and discussion of all unknown lexis before reading a text deprives students from practicing meaning inference. English as a foreign language reading materials need to encourage learners to read for meaning not for words, make conscious use of their background knowledge and experience, read in a structured way, and try to locate clues to meaning. Scott (2009) states that intensive research efforts in the area of reading comprehension instruction suggest that there is a dearth of reading comprehension instruction not only in English as a foreign language context but also in U.S. classrooms. U.S. teachers as well as English as second or foreign language teachers of reading suffer a lot inside the classrooms and sometimes go astray or get lost.
In conclusion, reconsideration of all these discussed issues reveals that reading teachers’ burden is not easy. Teachers have to be competent and aware of all these issues to avoid sayings such as, “the deprived has nothing to offer” or “a blind cannot judge colors.” Readers, however, need to be fortunate to have successful teachers who can develop their abilities, skills, and potentials for reading comprehension.
Method
The researcher of the present study followed the descriptive approach through which participants were questioned for the sake of describing the phenomenon being studied. A descriptive study is one in which information is collected without a change in the environment (i.e., nothing is manipulated). Sometimes these are referred to as “correlational” or “observational” studies. The Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) as stated at the official website of San Diego State University (n.d.) defines a descriptive study as “Any study that is not truly experimental.” In human research, a descriptive study can provide information about the naturally occurring health status, behavior, attitudes, or other characteristics of a particular group. Descriptive studies can involve a one-time interaction with groups of people (cross-sectional study) or a study might follow individuals over time (longitudinal study). Descriptive studies in which the researcher interacts with the participant may involve surveys or interviews to collect the necessary information.
Participants of the Study
The study involved (56) teachers in Saudi public schools who were enrolled in teaching during the first semester of the academic year 2014-2015. All of them were teaching intermediate stage students at the Directorate of Education in Najran region, at Saudi Arabia. Their teaching experience ranged from 3 to 16 years. All of them were alumni of Saudi universities. Their knowledge of English was only achieved through their learning at local schools or universities inside Saudi Arabia. None had the opportunity to use English in its native habitat. See Table 1.
Participants’ Distribution Regarding Experience.
Data Collection
The process of collecting data went through various stages. First, a meeting was held with all selected teachers. Then a debate about the importance of reading was organized followed by an explanation of further aims of the study. Teachers were informed that the results would be helpful in developing teaching reading strategies and mainly improve students’ comprehension levels. After that, two workshops were held to discuss the model lesson plan presented by Broughton et al. (1981). The first meeting was for male teachers. The second one involved female ones. At the end of each meeting, participant teachers were requested to prepare a similar lesson plan according to the proposed one. Some checks for improvement were made. The meetings were closed by asking participants to begin planning in the same way. Two weeks later, school visits began where each teacher was to be met individually to discuss his or her modified lesson plans and views regarding change in classrooms, and to answer the study questions.
Instruments
The study used three main instruments to collect the required data. Individual meeting was the first instrument. During that meeting, a discussion about reading and comprehension was organized and directed by the researcher himself. Notes about the performance of each teacher were taken and documented. The second instrument was a fill-in work sheet in which each participant had to answer a set of previously prepared questions. The set of questions involved three main parts. One part was about teachers’ beliefs in reading. The second part was about teachers’ perceptions of reading comprehension-teaching steps. The third one was a set of four open-ended questions. Each participant had to express his response by saying yes or no to the first two sets whereas he had to present long answers to these four main questions:
Explain the main differences between the two main stages of reading.
In specific steps, mention how you carry out the reading lesson inside the classroom.
Differentiate between teaching and testing questions.
What are the main types of questions you used to ask during the reading lesson?
After that, the model plan of question/answer type prepared by Broughton et al. (1981) was considered as a model for the reading lesson plan. All participant teachers were requested to follow this model of daily plans for 2 weeks.
Validity of Study Questions Included in the Fill-In Work Sheet
Ten experts from the educational field were chosen and consulted to evaluate the appropriateness of the study questions. Five of them were university professors who were lecturing about methods of instruction at education faculties at different Saudi universities. The other five were educational supervisors who were responsible for improving English language teaching environment. Seven of them reported the suitability of those questions. The other three, two faculty members and a supervisor, had some remarks. The questions were modified according to these remarks and represented to them all for a second time. A day later, they all sent back the set of questions marked by their agreement.
Findings
After thorough analyses of participants’ answers to study questions that were registered in the fill-in work sheet, notes taken during the conversation, and remarks registered on teachers’ lesson plans, the study concluded the following results.
There were no significant differences in the perceptions of teachers’ own abilities with regard to reading comprehension due to experience or gender.
Teachers’ identification of the “learning to read” and “reading to learn” phrases with regard to when and why they were used when teaching reading was very weak.
Participants could not specify the roles of both teachers and learners in each reading stage. They just mentioned a set of mixed, jumbled, and inconvenient roles
Findings Related to Teachers’ Beliefs in Reading
Teachers’ responses indicated strong beliefs in the importance of reading skill. Table 2 below presents teachers’ beliefs in reading comprehension.
Teachers’ Beliefs in Reading.
The above table shows that about 90% of males and 92% of females believed in the importance of such a language skill. About 83% of males and 96% of females mentioned that teaching reading was interesting. In addition, 77% of males and 77% of females reported their preference to teach reading to other language skills.
Findings Related to Teachers’ Perceptions or Reading Steps
With regard to participants’ perceptions of the main steps of teaching reading, answers revealed that teachers’ beliefs in reading comprehension were not reflected in their ways and steps of teaching this important and interesting skill. Table 3 below shows participants’ perceptions.
Teachers’ Perceptions of Reading Comprehension Teaching Steps.
Table 3 reveals that only 40% of male participants and 51% of female participants were aware of the main actions and steps to be implemented inside the reading comprehension classrooms. For example, 87% of males and 88% of females reported their heavy reliance on dictionary to help students explain the meanings of new words. Ninety-seven percent of males and 92% of females used to explain every detail in the reading text. On the opposite, 17% of males and 27% of females did not pay attention to look for the main aim of the reading text. Only 10% of males and 15% of females could differentiate between the bottom–up and top–down processes in reading. Regarding ideas elicitation, only 13% of males and 12% of females encouraged students to elicit the text’s ideas themselves.
Findings Related to Students’ Observation and Answers to the Open-Ended Questions
Responses of teachers, whether males or females as shown in Table 2 before, revealed their preferences and favoritism to teach reading. High percentages of those teachers reported that reading, as a language skill, was very important and interesting. Very few were unconvinced of that interest and importance. Nevertheless, beliefs of all respondents regarding reading importance, interest, and choice were not really reflected as well as needed in their reading comprehension classes. That is, reading love, importance, and enjoyment were not enough to make those teachers successful. Their performance inside the classroom as was noticed and documented and their replies to the open-ended four questions in the study reflected that they almost had no clear and definite strategy for teaching reading. No clear explanation for or differentiation between the learning to read and reading to learn. No clear steps for lesson implementation were provided. Questions were mixed. No clear categorization or classification was presented. Testing questions and teaching questions were always mixed inside the classroom. Teachers used to move from one type to another without clear purposes or reasons.
Findings Related to Teachers’ Views Regarding the Proposed Lesson Plan
Furthermore, teachers’ responses to the merits and demerits of the proposed lesson plan as was shown in Broughton et al. (1981) revealed a big enthusiasm to use it when planning for their reading classes. Table 4 below shows participants’ evaluation of such a lesson plan.
Teachers’ Responses to the Merits of the Proposed Lesson Plan.
Table 4 above indicates that, in general, about 84% of males and 87% of females were very enthusiastic for the use of the proposed lesson plan as appeared in Broughton et al. (1981). Only 16% of males and 13% of females were reluctant to use it in their reading classes. For instance, 93% of the male teachers and 96% of females believed that the proposed plan was easy to use. Ninety percent of males and 92% of females liked it because it could improve their performance inside the classroom. With regard to the improvement in learners’ achievement, 80% of males and females indicated that they noticed an improvement in their learners’ level of achievement. However, 73% of both participants reported a help by the proposed plan to look for the most important items in the reading text. Such a low percentage might be explained by the fact that this plan was completely new to all participants. In other words, 100% of participants mentioned that it was new to them. None had accessed it or coped with before.
Discussion of the Findings
Responses of teachers (males and females) of varied experience revealed their love and readiness for teaching reading. Very few did not consider reading as important and exciting. The majority reported that reading was an entrance for transferring knowledge to or from one’s society. However, attitudes, desires, readiness, and feelings of reading importance could not make teachers good ones. Their performance emphasized the belief that they had no clear and definite strategy for teaching the new and unknown words. They had no deep understanding of the aims of listing new lexis at the beginning of the lesson. New words were introduced in a vacuum with no real contexts related to either student’s real life or interests. The above summary of teachers’ beliefs and actions stress the fact that our Saudi teachers look at reading as decoding of words into speech where students read isolated words instead of making sense of the text. They do not take into account students’ learning habits. They do not try to minimize students’ heavy reliance on dictionaries. They are used to explain every detail inside the classroom. Students are not encouraged to think freely for the sake of building up their own explanations. Saudi teachers’ classroom activities are not well arranged to make a balance between the reading skills, mainly the bottom–up and top–down skills. Their high motivation for teaching reading skill should be clear. They should train learners to elicit ideas, understand others’ feelings and cultures, and make appropriate guesses related to the writer’s opinion and aims. Bang et al. (2003) state that learners’ reading comprehension can be enhanced in various ways. Teachers can improve students’ comprehension by focusing on concepts and vocabulary used to express them in addition to building on students’ background knowledge, that is, by having a group discussion before reading. Teachers can also guide students by modeling the actions they can take to improve comprehension. These actions include asking questions about a text while reading, identifying main ideas, and using prior knowledge to make predictions. Those mentioned observations on the performance of Saudi reading teachers meet with what Norris (1994) mentioned regarding the necessity to re-design or create interaction situations to give readers the opportunity to interact with the teacher, the text, and with one another. Such a situation can be achieved only if teachers possess or can map out a firm and clear understanding of what students’ reading processes and text comprehension entail.
However, blame cannot be totally placed upon Saudi teachers of English as a foreign language. Scott (2009) claims that teachers of English, even in the United States where English is the learners’ mother tongue, do not perform as well as desired inside reading classrooms. She mentions that studies repeatedly demonstrated that U.S. children were not taught in the right way to comprehend a text. Teachers used to be unprepared to teach students to do so. Her study findings revealed several notable trends. First, while analysis of classroom data suggested considerable variability regarding what counts as reading comprehension instruction, this variability could, in part, be attributed to the ways in which reading comprehension instruction had been characterized in policy, assessments, and the resources that were available to teachers. Importantly, analyses exposed a fundamental disjuncture between how leading literacy scholars define reading comprehension and how reading comprehension is conceptualized in other resources. Analyses also suggest that the knowledge base for teaching reading comprehension has been articulated in superficial ways and without the guidance of a coherent theoretical framework. Scott adds that across the lesson corpus, there were several salient trends with regard to what counted as reading comprehension instruction in the set of nominated lessons. Reading comprehension instruction happened largely in whole group instruction, was controlled by the teacher, and involved some combination of listening and speaking with very little explicit teaching and modeling. All teachers in the study focused on discussion of the reading process at some point during their nominated lessons, while only three teachers ever focused on discussing concepts or ideas in the text. Those teachers who did focus on text concepts did so for, on average, no more than 4% of lessons.
The second part of the questions aimed to investigate the processes, procedures, or techniques teachers often follow in the reading classes. Teachers’ responses revealed their partial ignorance of or mixture between the main phases of reading, that is, learning to read and reading to learn. Only 40% of male teachers and 51% of female respondents could differentiate between those two phases. In other words, a very high number of study participants used a mixture of procedures and techniques to teach reading. About 87% of males and 88% of females reported that they always ask learners to refer to dictionary to explain new words. Instead of doing so, they should encourage students to focus on the production or explanation of new words when needed to effectively exploit those words in real contexts or confidently talk about an idea in the text and so on. This finding matches to a great deal with Rivers and Temperley’s (1979) study with regard to reading. Reading, they state, for the sake of meaning extraction from a graphic script, should not be an aim in itself. Each student must be able to extract something of interest for him. Teaching reading should be through two stages. In the first one, which is learning to read, learners should be oriented toward building their personal lists of words. Later on, the newly learnt words will form their lists of specialized vocabulary. In the second stage, namely, reading to learn, learners should be urged to acquire recognition knowledge of basic grammar and common relational words. Learners should be able to guess the meanings of new words from the context, and they should learn the most frequently used nouns and verbs. Teachers not only misunderstood the nature of both stages but also minimized the time for students’ work. Class time was spent on things such as the following:
teaching unknown lexis;
asking questions about pictures if found;
asking students to read the text silently;
asking short questions about the text;
reading the text aloud in front of students;
asking students to, one by one, read the text aloud;
asking questions to find out if students have a similar experience;
teaching grammatical issues; and
asking comprehension questions.
A quick revision of the procedures above reveals the amount of time students used to spend on thinking and doing, on one hand, and the amount of time teachers spend on carrying out their commands, on the other hand. The above-mentioned situation of Saudi teachers agrees to a far extent, with the procedures mentioned below by Konaré (1994).
presenting new vocabulary, often at length;
reading the text aloud to the class while books are shut;
asking students what the text is about;
reading the text aloud again while students follow it in their books;
asking students some questions;
interrupting students while reading aloud to correct their pronunciation;
reading the text silently and try to remember as much as they can to answer the questions that may follow; and
asking oral questions and students answer orally.
However, Duke and Pearson (2002) claim that to develop learners’ capabilities to be good readers, teachers should train them to evaluate the text’s quality and value, and react to the text in a range of ways, both intellectually and emotionally. Learners should be taught to read various kinds of text differently. For example, when reading narrative, good readers attend closely to the setting and characters, whereas when reading expository text, they frequently construct and revise summaries of what they have read. Students need to understand that text processing occurs not only during “reading” but also during short breaks taken during reading, even after the “reading” itself has commenced, or even after the “reading” has ceased. Comprehension, in brief, is a consuming, continuous, and complex activity.
Types of questions asked by teachers were another important issue to which the study paid attention. Participants’ questions and ways of questioning were not appropriate and fit for the aims of reading comprehension. Alyousef (2005) mentioned that teachers’ questions should be guided with ideas such as the set below to accomplish the aim of reading in general:
Read a wide range of texts in English.
Build a knowledge of language that facilitates reading ability.
Build schematic knowledge.
Adapt the reading style to the reading purpose.
Develop an awareness of the structure or written texts.
Take a critical stance to the contents of the texts.
Therefore, when asking questions for text discussion, teachers should use what is called a teaching question. They have to ask numerous yes/no and multiple-choice questions. They have to begin with yes/no question, re-ask students to choose one of two or more answers to make sure of students’ follow-up, and then sum up or repeat the answer many times. Once discussion or teaching questions is over, teachers can move to what is called testing questions. Testing questions are those ones that aim to check students’ overall understanding of text’s points. Testing questions are usually known as Wh. Questions. Back again to Saudi teachers’ questions, their responses indicated no full understanding of these question types. Their failure to lead a successful discussion inside reading comprehension classes may be mainly due to their misconception of this fact and timing of question use. Sometimes they ask a testing question in a time they are expected to use a yes/no or choose questions. Broughton et al. (1981) defined the main characteristics of each question type. They said that teaching questions are
numerous,
oral than written,
constructed in a sequence that leads pupils to pay particular attention to various aspects of the text, and
likely to be provocative in the sense that they constitute the opening move in an exchange, which might grow into a discussion.
Testing questions, however, are
very often written;
directed at very specific vocabulary items and chosen points in the text, demanding definitions or explanations; and
used to encourage logical inferences.
With regard to teachers’ comments on the effectiveness of the provided lesson plan model, nearly 84% of males and 87% of female participants showed their enthusiasm and willingness to adopt and adapt it in their lesson plans. The fact that participants welcomed such a lesson plan is attributed to the fact that most of the teachers were not well prepared whether at universities or later on when they joined teaching profession. Participants’ positive views of the proposed lesson plan express their willingness and change acceptance. To train a teacher separately on each skill is more fruitful than preparing him to meet a mysterious and vague position where he is needed to retain information that suits every new context. Furthermore, participant teachers were invited to take part in the discussion of the content of the proposed plan. Nothing was imposed but introduced interestingly. That is, teachers accept change. Sheng (2000) believes that teachers, while teaching, should be aware of surface and deep structures. The first focuses on the linguistic recognition whereas the latter seeks cognitive understanding of the text content. Classroom visits to Saudi teachers before and after the study revealed much about the amount of change that happened. Before the study, teachers used to act on the surface structure level. Reaching the deep structure level was somehow difficult and so students were not trained to exhibit their understanding of the reading text through pointing out and expressing their own reactions, evaluations, and appreciation of reading content. Wooly’s (2011) and Scott’s (2009) investigation about learners and teachers of reading can shed light on the difficult situation of this phenomenon not only in the foreign language-teaching situation but also in the first language-teaching situation. They mentioned that a significant number of students in Australian schools were found struggling with basic reading comprehension. In the United States, it was also acknowledged that as students progressed through school, there was the widening academic gap between those who had adequate reading skills and those who did not.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it can be strongly claimed that Saudi teachers usually suffer from severe deficiencies in reading lessons. Their blunders and vague strategy during the lesson can shed light on their need for the support of other parties. The amount of training and the sort of preparation programs must be reconsidered and modified. Teachers, in general, and reading ones, in particular, should not be weak; otherwise, they will fail in their profession. Their teaching strategies should be modified and improved in various ways. They are recommended to keep on developing themselves from time to time. They should join sustainable in-service development programs that seek the modification of teaching strategies and methods. In addition, they should convince themselves that within globalized societies and knowledge society, the traditional teacher may be allowed to survive, but definitely, weak ones will not. Therefore, they should choose self-development or quit the job.
Recommendations
In light of the previously mentioned findings of the present study, the researcher has presented the following set of recommendations.
Researchers are called for conducting studies to identify the differences in students’ reading achievement levels because of adopting the previously discussed lesson plan of Broughton et al. (1981) in other reading classes.
The concerned authorities in the ministry of education in Saudi Arabia should be more interested in lesson plans and so look for the latest in this respect.
The concerned authorities in the ministry of education in Saudi Arabia should cooperate with specialists and people of expertise in the planning domain to improve teachers’ performance levels inside classrooms.
The concerned authorities in the ministry of education in Saudi Arabia should provide opportunities for teachers of English language to attend and participate in training programs in the field of planning for teaching.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editor and reviewers of Sage Open for their valuable comments that contributed to the improvement of this article. I also highly appreciate the efforts of all male and female teachers who took part in the study. Finally, I am indebted to my wife, sons, and daughters for their patience and encouragement.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.