ENHANCING READING COMPREHENSION OF EFL STUDENTS WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES: QUALITATIVE FINDINGS

This paper describes the results of an evaluation study of an intervention program designed to EFL students with learning disabilities who wished to pass the national English matriculation exam in Israel. The innovative teaching technique aimed at imparting students with concrete reading comprehension strategies to enhance their EFL reading comprehension and their EFL academic self-efficacy. The findings indicated an enhancement of both reading comprehension and academic self-efficacy. The content analysis of students' verbal narratives also unveiled the factors that enabled these improvements. The prominent variables were found to be teacher-student dialogues which enabled free interactions during class time and the concreteness of the reading comprehension strategies both of which reduced anxiety and increased motivation. Additional resulting variables were an increased task-persistence and an adoption of self-regulation processes. There were also few indications of learners' difficulty to apply the strategies learnt during the intervention program emanating from inattentiveness, inability to adopt self-regulation processes, and to adjust to the class size and to the duration of the intervention program. Conceptually, foreign language reading acquisition involved the integration of three processes; the strategic-pedagogical, the cognitive and the emotional one. Practically, this study may lay the basis for the development of frameworks for EAP teachers and curriculum designs. (c) 2018 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org.UK