Intensive reading based on cross curricular topics: A strategy to foster students’ reading comprehension

Abstract

“Fostering Reading Comprehension Skills in A1 Students” is a project carried out in a public school in Bogotá with a group of eleventh grade students. Reading comprehension is a key aspect for being successful in academic and professional fields. This project examines the use of intensive reading skills based on cross-curricular topics in order to help students improve their reading comprehension ability. Reading comprehension was analyzed using a mixed method approach. The qualitative analysis was done through students’ surveys, teacher’s journal, and the quantitative analysis through reading tests and students’ artifacts. The analysis showed that students improved their reading comprehension ability especially in the kind of exercises like gap filling, multiple choice and true and false. Conversely, they struggle to find word definitions when there is not a specific context. Additionally they had difficulties answering open questions. Through the research it was identified the necessity of having a reading comprehension program in English during all secondary, beginning in basic secondary. It is not enough to have a strong process only in eleventh grade. Another effect of using intensive reading skills based on crosscurricular topics is that students gained confidence in their reading comprehension process. Moreover, the cross-curricular topics helped them to activate their prior knowledge as well as to infer the meaning of words in a specific context.