Abstract
Despite the changes that have occurred in the teaching methods employed in university reading classes, there are still significant challenges in teaching reading, particularly when it comes to students' ability to comprehend the implicit meaning of texts. Utilizing Critical Discourse Analysis can be beneficial for enhancing students' output cognitive strategies in the classroom and unveiling the hidden aspects of texts. This study aims to improve the output cognitive strategies through reading lessons by adapting some techniques of van Dijk's model to EFL university students of Tikrit/ College of Education for Women. Consequently, it is hypothesized that van Dijk's model, as a reading strategy, has a positive impact on the output cognitive strategies of EFL university students in general, and on the types of output cognitive strategies: Analyzing, integrating, interpreting, reasoning, summarizing and visualizing.
To achieve this aim, 80 second-year EFL college students participated in the study and were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control groups, with 40 students in each group. The experimental group received instruction in van Dijk's model for two hours per week over a six-week period. This study utilizes a validated test, and various statistical methods are employed to analyze the collected data. Based on the findings, some conclusions and relevant recommendations are presented.
