Pre-reading activities and reading comprehension

Abstract

The present research was carried out to investigate the effects of the use of pre-reading activities to develop reading comprehension. The participants were 26 students in the second semester of “Pedagogía de los Idiomas Nacionales y Extranjeros” program at Universidad Técnica de Ambato. They were taking the Reading subject. The methodology used was a quasi-experimental design. The study lasted five weeks and the classes were divided into synchronous and asynchronous. At the beginning, a PET (Preliminary English Test) was administered as a pre-test to determine the students' reading comprehension level. It is important to mention that only the reading part was taken from the exam. Moreover, pre-reading activities were applied as a treatment. The activities were pre-teaching vocabulary, brainstorming, and storytelling. In addition, the researcher created a Google Classroom to apply extra activities to further improve learners’ reading comprehension. In the last week, a post-test was applied using a PET exam, applying just the reading section, with the same structure of the pre-test, however, it had different questions. Finally, the results were analyzed using the SPSS program and they showed that the use of the pre-reading activities did help to improve the reading comprehension of the 26 participants.