The Effect of Using Task-based Activities on Reading Comprehension Skill among Iranian Intermediate Pre-university Students

Within the framework of Task-based Language Teaching / Learning, it is believed that since learners work to complete a task, they have abundant opportunity to interact. Such interaction is thought to facilitate language acquisition as learners have to work to understand each other and to express their own meaning. The research study reported herein was designed to investigate the effects of using task-based activities on reading comprehension skill among Iranian intermediate pre-university students. To this end, sixty male EFL participants from pre-university level in Hamedan were selected and assigned to two groups (experimental and control) on the basis of their performance on the Oxford Placement Test as pre-test. Then, the subjects in experimental group underwent practice on reading passages through using different kinds of task-based activities during a one-month period. During the treatment, the experimental group participants had the opportunity to produce output (use language) through negotiation based on doing task-based activities both orally and in written form. The control group did not produce but answered some cliché comprehension exercises (true/false, multiple-choice items). They received some placebo activities with no treatment. Both groups were exposed to the same passages but did different tasks. At the end of the experimental period, the subjects in the two groups were given the post-test of reading comprehension. The raw scores were submitted to a series of t-tests. The results showed that using task-based activities during treatment period contributed significantly to the performance on reading comprehension in experimental group. In addition, the experimental group showed significant difference in their general language proficiency. Further studies are needed to investigate the impact of other task-based criteria on reading comprehension skill as well as speaking, writing and also listening comprehension by changing the type of elicitation instruments, the time of experimental treatment and the subjects’ proficiency level.