Page 72 - Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

56 Apuntes de Investigación en la Enseñanza de Idiomas

Methodology

This research was developed within the BA in English Language, Curriculum 2008, at the University
of Veracruz. The general objective of this curriculum is to develop professional competencies in EFL
students. Furthermore, the informants of this research were five students from one of the groups of
Beginning Reading and Writing. The five informants, who willingly decided to participate, were five
girls aged between eighteen and twenty. The five informants, who belonged to the same group, were
attending second semester at the time they participated in this research. At the same time, they were
enrolled in the Elementary English course. All the informants claimed to have studied English at high
school.

The instrument used in the two stages in which this research was carried out was the Think Aloud
Protocol. It is also known as verbal report and verbal protocol. This instrument was used since it is
a useful method of eliciting the strategies used by participants when they are performing a task as
shown in Tabataba’ian’s (2011) case study that explored the strategies some EFL learners studying
in an upper-intermediate level at College of Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran.

Think Aloud Protocol is defined by Nunan (1992, p.117) as “techniques in which subjects complete a
task or solve a problem and verbalize their thought processes as they do so.” Additionally, in this te-
chnique the researcher collects the think aloud protocol on a tape and then analyses it or the thinking
strategies involved. In the field of reading research, the think aloud protocol aims to assess students’
strategy use in a specific reading task.

Results

The results of the five protocols reveal information about the use of while-reading strategies. Only
three out of the six while-reading strategies were present: combination of reading styles, combina-
tions of skills and strategies and making conscious inferences. The common reading strategy that
the five participants applied was making conscious inferences. Two participants used a combination
of skills and strategies and one participant identified important information.

Although the five participants made conscious inferences, there were two variations of this strategy:
some of them inferred the meaning of unknown words by using internal clues and external clues,
while the others related information in the text to their prior knowledge. The use of internal clues was
a strategy explicitly used by one participant. Most of the participants attempted to infer the meaning
of unknown words by using external clues, such as neighboring words, or the main idea of the text.
One participant (P1) was successful in her attempts; three out of five participants (P3, P4, and P5)
were not successful.