Promoting collaborative learning in virtual forums to enhance students’ reading comprehension skills

Abstract

​​Reading comprehension plays a significant role in the EFL community. Previous research has discovered that providing explicit instruction on reading strategies is one of the most effective means of helping students to overcome reading comprehension problems. However, little attention has been given to collaborative learning as an approach for teaching reading strategies through virtual platforms such as forums. Consequently, this action research study aimed at identifying the impact of providing explicit instruction on reading strategies and developing collaborative tasks through a virtual environment. The participants of this research were 67 tenth and eleventh graders from two public schools in Bogotá, Colombia. Through the implementation of this approach, students were involved in a set of collaborative tasks in which they had the opportunity to share and contrast their ideas on informative texts in English with their classmates in order to build a deeper understanding of them. Findings provided evidence that students learned and were able to implement different reading comprehension strategies. The learners also showed the ability to apply those strategies effectively in the proposed virtual tasks.