Reading Comprehension in a Sociocultural Context: Effect on Learners of Two Proficiency Levels

The present study aimed at investigating the possible effect of implementing sociocultural techniques on reading comprehension development of Iranian EFL learners. The focus of this research has been on the impact of two different teaching techniques (scaffolding and non-scaffolding) and learners’ proficiency levels on the reading comprehension development of the learners. Ninety-five non-English major students in Mazandaran University and Islamic Azad University participated in this study A Nelson English language test and a researcher-made reading comprehension test were used as data collection instruments of this study. The results of the study indicated that the scaffolding techniques (peer and teacher scaffolding) led to better reading comprehension development compared to the non-scaffolding group. It was also shown that the proficiency level of the learners played a determining role in reading comprehension development of the two groups participating in this study and that the low proficiency learners outperformed the high proficiency ones. The result suggests that the low proficiency learners gain more than the high proficiency learners although this superiority is not due to the teaching techniques implemented in this study, as revealed in the split-plot ANOVA analysis.