The Effect of Collaborative Strategy Use on Iranian EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

The importance of reading skill has been realized in SLA and it has expanded in the previous decades (Nuttall, 2005; Singhal, 2001). This growing interest has resulted in an increasing demand for both effective reading courses as well as high-quality second language materials (Pressley, 2002). It has also led to the realization of the need for more studies. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of two different collaborative strategies namely jigsaw reading and literature circle on Iranian EFL learners’ reading skill. To this end, 60 female upper-intermediate Iranian EFL learners were selected based on the results of Oxford Placement Test (OPT) to participate in this study. IELTS Reading Comprehension as Pre-test and Post-test were used in this study to elicit information from the students. To analyze the collected data, two One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were run. The results of this study showed that involving language learners in literature circle and jigsaw reading activities can have positive effects on their reading comprehension. It was revealed that “Literature Circle” improved the participants performance on reading comprehension test better than “jigsaw reading” and it was more advantageous over “jigsaw reading” used as collaborative strategy although the difference was not statistically significant.