The Impact of Student-Initiated Interaction on EFL Reading Comprehension

Abstract

The study reported in this paper aims to compare the reading comprehension of three groups of intermediate adult EFL learners on a reading comprehension passage under three input conditions: simplified condition (SC) characterized by both lexical and syntactic simplification, negotiated condition (NC) with no linguistic adjustments but with opportunities for interaction with the teacher, and unmodified condition (UC) without any modification or intervention. The results of the study revealed that the participants in both SC and NC groups significantly outperformed their peers in the UC group on the reading comprehension test. Moreover, the participants in the NC group achieved a significantly higher mean score than the participants in the UC group. This suggests that opportunities for negotiation of meaning facilitate reading comprehension more than linguistic adjustments. The conclusions drawn from the findings of this study highly recommend the use of authentic reading materials accompanied by negotiated interaction between the teacher and the learners. Key words: interaction; negotiation; simplification; reading comprehension