THE EFFECT OF ALTERNATIVE TEACHING ON IMPROVING EFL LEARNERʹʹS READING COMPREHENSION

The present study intended to examine whether alternative teaching strategy could maximize Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learnersʹ reading comprehension better than the traditional single teaching. Employing alternative teaching proposed by Cook and Friend (2004), two intermediate EFL classes (total N=30) who already passed level 5 at a private language institute in Ilam, Iran were selected. They were all female, aged 17-25.Three experienced male teachers aged nearly thirty-nine took part in the study. In one class, reading comprehension was implemented by one teacher and in the other class two teachers cotaught the students. The findings of the study revealed that there was a significant difference between the control and the experimental group in terms of their reading improvement and that experimental group outperformed the control group. This finding implies that the implementation of alternative teaching strategy in educational systems, at least for teaching reading comprehension in an EFL context like Iran, can be contributive.