Let's Cross the Rubicon: Strengthening Reading Comprehension Instruction

This study aimed to assess the differential effects of three instructional programs – cooperative, collaborative, and teacher-directed teaching methods – on the reading comprehension performance of EFL learners. A pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was used. The three selected groups (n= 93) were instructed over a period of 8 weeks. Results indicate that students who received the cooperative intervention fared far better than students in the other two groups; the collaborative and teacher-directed groups’ performance was not significant. The current study concludes that an interactional pattern that has properly been structured is apparently more effective than its counterpart that is unstructured.