Think-aloud Test-taking Strategies for Reading Comprehension in Multiple-choice and Unstructured Items among Iranian EFL Learners

This paper offers the strategies that Iranian EFL learners employ in order to answer reading comprehension questions in multiple-choice and unstructured items using think-aloud protocol. 30 Iranian EFL learners with the level of upper-intermediate were asked to record their voice while reading and answering reading comprehension multiple-choice and unstructured items. By collecting and analyzing the protocols, it was found that the students try to match the words and the phrases in the distracters or the stem with those in the reading passage, to review the questions before reading the passage, to apply a fast, surface reading of the passage rather than a detailed reading, and also guessing the right answer by eliminating the distracters are the strategies participants primarily use to get to the right answer.