The Importance of Text Structure Awareness in Promoting Strategic Reading among EFL Readers

Making EFL/ESL students aware of effective and efficient reading strategies that assist in the reading of English texts has been the concern of educators and researchers, and specifically reading instructors for years. Dissatisfaction with the current methods of teaching English and awareness of the positive effect of strategy training has led teachers in Iran to adopt holistic approaches to text processing. Of equal concern is to make students metacognitively aware of strategies and techniques that promote reading comprehension in terms of the macro level characteristics of the text. Text structure knowledge has been recognized as an efficient strategy that enhances reading comprehension. To this end, 85 Iranian EFL learners were provided with instruction on discourse structuring signals (transitional words, frame markers, endophoric markers, code glosses, and punctuation marks) during one semester. The results demonstrated that metacognitive awareness of text structure and overt teaching of textual features facilitate students’ reading comprehension.