Developing Public College Students Reading Comprehension Skills through Communicative Language Teaching Method: An Experimental Study

Abstract

There is an on-goingphenomenon witnessed that students at intermediate level do not
enjoy reading due to lack of appropriate reading comprehension skills. This could be for
many reasons but commonly this flaw is because reading comprehension is done firstly,
on the basis of traditional methods adopted by the teacher who himself reads and explains
in the class. Secondly, reading comprehension is conducted on Grammar Translation
Method (GTM).Both of the approaches make learners boring and uninterested because
their participation role is at minimum level. This research paper is an attempt to prove
that students reading comprehension skills can be improved by introducing different
strategies of teaching such as communication, participation in the class and by certain
other integrated strategies. For this purpose, the research was carried onin one of the
public college situated in Karachi. For this research to be carried out second year students
from pre-engineering group were chosen for the study they were divided in to two
separate groups and named accordingly as group(A)and (B). Group “A” was kept as
controlled group. While group” B” was treated as the treatment group. An experiment
was carried out through t-test. There were two tests taken one a pre-test and second was
taken after the interval of five weeks and named as post –test to verify the
hypothesis.After the experimentation it was proved that communicative language
teaching methodology brought significant development among students reading
comprehension skills.