Compound nouns and reading comprehension: creating awareness of compound nouns to improve the reading comprehension of students of english at the university of Cuenca

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to investigate the impact that direct instruction of compound noun identification and decoding had on the reading comprehension of a third-level group of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students at the University of Cuenca during the semester March-July, 2013. Accordingly, a quasi-experimental study was applied to one group of thirty students in an intact class, using a mixed methods approach. Pretests and posttests were administered before and after the treatment, while a survey and an interview helped triangulate the results. The treatment was composed of three main parts. First, students were taught how to identify compound nouns. Second, they used inventories to decode compound nouns. Finally, students applied this knowledge to reading comprehension exercises. The results were processed by SPSS 22 which allowed to run the t test for repeated measurements. The findings revealed that the direct instruction of compound nouns produced a reasonable increase in the students’ reading comprehension ability.