The Effect of Automatization of the Phonological Component on the Reading Comprehension of ESP Students

Prompted by the recent shift of attention from just focusing on the top-down processing in L2 reading towards considering the basic component, bottom-up processing, the role of phonological component has also enjoyed popularity among a selected circle of SLA investigators (Koda, 2005). This study investigated the effect of the automatization of the phonological component on the reading comprehension of the ESP students. After administering a reading section of a TOEFL test, sixty participants out of one hundred and thirty were selected from among ESP students volunteering to participate in this study. These sixty participants were randomly assigned to two groups namely, control group and experimental group. The result of the pre-test revealed that there was not any significance difference between the two groups prior to the treatment. Then, in the period of one semester, the control group received reading instruction through the automatization of phonological component (i.e. pronunciation practice) and the control group received the reading instruction based on the traditional approach which was based on literal translation of English words and sentences into their Persian equivalents. After the treatment, all the participants took the post-test. The result of an Independent-samples T-test indicated that teaching reading through the automatization of phonological component was more effective than the traditional approach in reading instruction. The result of this study is considered to be useful in methodological issues related to reading instruction and also teacher education programs. Moreover, the findings of this study have theoretical implications for SLA researchers.