Teaching Test-Taking Strategies to EFL Student Readers with Different Language Proficiencies: An Empirical Reassessment

This study investigated the effect of teaching test-taking strategies to EFL student readers with different levels of reading proficiency (i.e. high and low). Two groups of undergraduate non-English majors joined an eight-week experiment. One served as the treatment group (TG) which learned test-taking strategies to tackle English reading test tasks, while the control group (CG) received no strategy instruction. The pretest and posttest reading performances of all the participants from the TG and CG were quantitatively compared. Additionally, the TG’s use of test-taking strategies was investigated by means of entry and exit surveys. The results show that the students at both proficiency levels of the TG made significantly greater gains in the reading posttest compared with the pretest, and they also significantly outperformed their counterparts from the CG on the posttest. The participants from both levels of the TG also used significantly more test-taking strategies than before, but they used some strategies more frequently than others. Taken together, the results support the pedagogical effects of the instruction in test-taking strategies in EFL reading classes.