TEXTUAL AND INTER-TEXTUAL ANALYSES OF IRANIAN EFL UNDERGRADUATES’ TYPES OF ENGLISH READING TOWARDS DEVELOPING A CAREFUL READING FRAMEWORK

This study investigated textual and inter-textual reading of a group of Iranian EFL undergraduates’ careful English reading types. In this research, Khalifa and Weir’s (2009) reading framework was used to propose a more inclusive aspect of a careful reading framework and the reading construct for instructional and assessment goals. The participants of this study were B.A. students of English Translation at Shiraz Payame Noor University. To obtain the required data, a questionnaire and a careful reading test along with reading journals, interviews, and retrospective verbal protocols were used. The findings revealed that careful reading at the sentential and textual levels were seen to be practiced frequently by the participants. However, reading purposes and cognitive processes requiring integrating information from different texts, reading critically to establish and evaluate the authors’ position on a particular topic, building links across texts, judging the relatedness of texts, evaluating the writer’s ideas and comparing viewpoints were not seen as prevalent emerged reading patterns. The participants performed differently on tasks measuring different types of careful reading at different levels in a descending order of difficulty. In doing the tasks, although no statistically significant difference was found between the performance of males and females, they performed differently regarding their age and educational level differences. Subsequently, based on the outcomes, in the proposed careful reading framework, some new variables such as educational level, age, documents knowledge, better understanding and careful reading at multiple text level structures were added to Khalifa and Weir’s (2009) reading framework.