The Effects of Cognitive Reading Strategy Training on Students’ Reading Performance and Reading Motivation

Abstract

This study investigated whether explicit cognitive reading strategy training contributes to students’ reading performance and reading motivation. The study was carried out in a randomly selected Ethiopian public secondary school in Hosanna Town. A quasi-experimental research approach was set out to investigate the effect of explicit cognitive reading strategy training on both reading performance and reading motivation of Grade 9 students. To gather data before and after 10-hour training within eight weeks, a teacher-made pre-test, a parallel teacher-made post-test, and a reading motivation questionnaire were employed. A total of 70 students, that is, 35 students from each of the control and experimental groups participated in the study. Independent Samples Test (to compare two groups) and Paired Samples Test (to compare group scores) were used to analyse data using SPSS, version 25. The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference between the pre-test and post-test scores of reading performance of the Experimental Group (p=.000), which was in contrast to the insignificant relationship between the scores of the Control Group (p=.299). However, the Control Group showed improvement in reading motivation (p=.047) than the Experimental Group did (p=.062). The results revealed that explicit cognitive reading strategy training improved students’ reading performance. Thus, concerned bodies should give due attention to teaching cognitive reading strategies explicitly and enhancing students’ reading comprehension.