The Effect of Oral Presentation as a Reading Assignment on Students’ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Reading is one of the four skills that contribute to L2 proficiency and reading comprehension is the purpose of any reader-text interaction. This research tackles students’ reading comprehension breakdowns when reading English texts. The present study investigates the effect of oral presentations as follow up reading assignments on foreign language reading comprehension. To achieve this goal, an experimental study was carried out with the participation of second year students of English as a foreign language studying at Abdelhafid Boussouf University Center, in Mila, during the academic year of 2016-2017. The data gathered through the experiment and the teachers’ interview led to the following conclusions: 1/oral presentation assignments as reading tasks do indeed enhance the students’ reading comprehension performance as measured by multiple choice test scores. 2/ Teachers at the English department, at Abdelhafid Boussouf University Center, are well aware of the difficulties that students face while reading as well as the causes behind them. 3/ Oral presentation assignments are underused by teachers of modules which do not deal with oral expression or TEFL. Deriving from these results, a number of recommendations are put forward by the researchers. The most crucial of said recommendations is the integration of the reading skill as an independent module into the curriculum.