Turkish Students’ Comprehension Monitoring and Strategic Behaviors While Reading in French: A think-aloud study

Year 2017, Volume: 7 Issue: 2, 90 - 112, 01.07.2017

Meral Özkan Gürses Eric Bouvet

Abstract

 The present study aims to examine how Turkish students of French monitor their
understanding and how they behave strategically when reading a French literary
text. Differences between more proficient and less proficient readers are also
explored in terms of types and frequencies of strategies used during the global
monitoring cycle, which encompasses Evaluation, Action, and Checking phases. The
data was collected through think-aloud protocols from eight students who studied
French in the Department of Foreign Languages at a Turkish university. The findings
reveal that the participants used mostly instrumental strategies from the Action
phase to deal with problems at word or sentence level. Furthermore, they show that
the more proficient participants in the study used a wider range of strategies from
different phases of the monitoring cycle more frequently compared to their less
proficient counterparts. However, the only significant difference found between the
two proficiency groups relate to the skipping and ignoring a problem strategy.

Keywords

Comprehension monitoring, French as a foreign language, Second language reading, Reading strategies, Think-aloud protocols

References

• Afflerbach, P. (2000). Verbal reports and protocol analysis. In M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (pp. 163–179). New York, NY: Longman.