Effects of Training in Figures of Speech on EFL Learners’ Literary Reading Comprehension Ability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the major areas of interest in SLA research is the study of the ways in which expert and non-expert readers respond to L2 texts and the fundamental changes that can be brought about in their L2 reading processes through formal instruction. In line with this research tradition, the present quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of formal training in figures of speech on university EFL learners’ appreciation of an unseen literary text, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” in the case of this study. Understanding literature requires knowledge of figures of speech.An experimental group (n=29) and a control group (n=26) of intermediate 3rd year EFL learners, studying English for a B.A. degree at Kashan University, Iran, participated in the study. The participants were first pre-tested and matched for their level of proficiency in English and their initial reading comprehension ability. In addition to the normal curriculum content, the experimental group received instruction in figures of speech through a course called "Fonun va Sana'at" (Figures of Speech). The control group did not receive this instruction. Both groups were post-tested on their ability to read a literary passage and to appreciate it.The results of t-test analysis of the resulting data revealed significant differences between the means of the two groups. The experimental group that had received instruction in figures of speech significantly outperformed the control group. The findings of the study have practical implications for material development, curriculum planning, teaching English through literature, and second language acquisition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".