The purposes of this study were to explore the effects of reciprocal instruction on EFL reading comprehension and metacognition of the ninth-grade students in junior high school. The researcher employed ¡§ET-RT model¡¨ (explicit teaching before reciprocal teaching). The students received the four strategies before the dialogues started. A quasi-experimental study was used. The research subjects were 68 students of two classes from a junior high school in Kaohsiung City. The experimental group was stratified randomly and received the reciprocal instruction, whereas the control group received the traditional instruction. The experiment was implemented in a 9-week session, 2 times a week, with each time 45 minutes of reciprocal teaching instruction. Before and after the experiment, both groups took the test of English reading comprehension, the questionnaire of reading metacognition and the questionnaire of reciprocal instruction. The data were analyzed by t-test and a one-way ANCOVA. The major findings of the study were as following¡G 1. The reciprocal instruction has significantly immediate and continued effects on English reading comprehension of the ninth-grade students. 2. The reciprocal instruction has significantly immediate and enlarged effects on reading metacognitive capability of the ninth-grade students. 3. Most of the students in the experimental group believed that reciprocal teaching promoted their English reading comprehension and interests of reading.

The purpose of this degree project is to find out what opportunities discourse analysis offers in teaching EFL reading. It aims at determining what areas of discourse analysis are relevant to teaching EFL reading at Swedish upper-secondary school as well as identifying what language teachers and learners can borrow from the linguistic study of text and discourse and make use of in the language classroom as well as outside it. The degree project is based on secondary research on discourse analysis within the selected works in applied linguistics, language teaching, and social sciences. The sources are reviewed critically and the results are presented. The degree project emphasises the role of discourse analysis in the shift from English being a purely proficiency-oriented subject to being a democracy-oriented subject.

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The purpose of this research was to conduct case studies to explore and describe Thai university students' awareness and application of cognitive and metacognitive strategies when reading and writing in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL). Four participants, including two high and two low English language proficiency learners, were selected from 14 students enrolled in a five-week course called English for Social Sciences offered at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand in 2005. The major sources of data for the analyses included the transcripts of the participants' pair discussions, think-aloud protocols, interviews, and daily journal entries. In addition, field work observations, reading and writing strategy checklists, participants' written work, and the comparison of the pretest and posttest results were also instrumental to the analyses. The interpretive approach of content analysis was employed for these four case studies. Findings were initially derived from the single-case analyses, and then from cross-case analyses. Major findings revealed that strategic knowledge enhanced these English-as-a-foreign- language (EFL) learners' proficiency in English reading and writing. However, applying elaborative strategies for higher-level reading was challenging for most of the participants. Two crucial factors that impeded their development were the learners' uncertain procedural and conditional knowledge of strategy uses and their limited English language proficiency due to limited exposure to the second language (L2). The teacher's explanations and modeling of strategies, the participants' opportunities to discuss strategy use with peers, and extensive practice positively enhanced their development. Additionally, the learners' schema and knowledge of text structures played significant roles in their development of the two skills. These English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners also developed metacognitive awareness and strategy applications, but not to the level that always enhanced effective regulation and control of their reading and writing behaviors. Combining reading and writing in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) instruction promoted the learners' awareness of the relationships of certain strategies for the two skills, and developed their literacy skills holistically.