Reconsidering the effectiveness of silent reading: A comparative study of silent reading and oral reading on leaners' listening comprehension

Abstract

This study investigated how two types of reading activity―silent reading and oral reading―facilitate English language learners' listening comprehension. 83 university students were assigned to the silent reading group (n=37) and the oral reading group (n=46). Each group was also divided into higher and lower groups according to the level of their listening comprehension. The pre-and post-test were conducted before and after the 10-week training session for each group.

The results of a t test indicated that the silent reading group had significantly higher listening comprehension, while no significant differences were found in the score of the oral reading group.

A possible explanation for the better performance of the silent reading group over the oral group is that reading silently not only helped reduce the cognitive load of the students but facilitated the sentence comprehension, whereas the oral reading group paid more attention to reading the words rather than comprehending the actual content. The results also suggest that the silent reading group may have adopted top-down processing where they were given the opportunity to comprehend the sentences at their own pace.