The Effect of Advancing EFL Learner s awareness on discourse strategies On Reading Comprehension Competency

Teaching reading comprehension and advancing EFL learners comprehension competency have always been a great challenge for language teachers. Moreover, some reading resources do not address and deal with the discursive strategies that facilitate the reading comprehension. In this paper, we suggest that advancing the ELF learner s discursive awareness on how different participants and events are construed and recontextualized in discourse will enable the learners to deepen their understanding of the passage. To this end, we adopted the socio-semantic discourse analysis framework developed by van Leeuwen (2008) to teach the construal of social actors and representation of various events in novels to EFL learners. We aimed to find out to what extent the increased knowledge on discursive strategies of actor an event representation will promote learners reading comprehension. Findings suggest that learners acquire more detailed knowledge of the reading passages when they are provided with the knowledge of discursive strategies of actor and event knowledge. Our findings also suggested that through the knowledge of discursive strategies, learners acquire critical knowledge and advance their understanding of the reading passages beyond the textual level and discuss the socio-political meanings underlying the discourse.