Comparative Effect of Scaffolding Instruction and Self-Regulated Learning on ESP Learners‟ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

The present research was carried out to investigate the effect of scaffolding and self-regulation on the reading comprehension of ESP students. For this purpose, one hundred and thirty ESP students who had passed prerequisite general English courses and who were about to take the professional English course were chosen. Further, through the PET test they were homogenized. Besides, the participants were non-randomly assigned to two experimental groups and one control group. Therefore, a quasi-experimental design was adopted to test the effect of scaffolding instruction and self-regulated learning on ESP learners' reading comprehension. This study had a pretest before the treatment and a posttest at the end. Then, in order to find whether, scaffolding or self-regulation could be more effective on ESP students‟ reading comprehension, the pretest scores were compared with the posttest scores. The statistical measure of MANOVA was used to test the group scores and compare them against each other. The analysis of the data revealed that the experimental group in relation to scaffolding effect on reading comprehension outperformed the control group. In addition, it was found that the scaffolding group significantly outperformed the self-regulation learning group on the posttest of reading comprehension. This study has implications for students and teachers