THE EFFECT OF AWARENESS CONCERNING COHESION ELEMENTS ON READING SKILLS OF FRENCH LEARNERS

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of awareness about anaphora and conjunctions on reading skills of French learners studying at Anadolu University, French Language Teaching Department. The participants are 9 sophomores taking Advanced Reading-Writing course. Their level is intermediate (B1).  The pretest-posttest model was applied and the scores before and after the application were compared. The duration of the study was 4 weeks, 3 hours per week. Moreover, in order to determine reading difficulties of the learners and to clarify their views on the benefits of the application, they were given a questionnaire. According to the comparison of pretest-posttest results, pretest results were found higher. This means the application had no considerable effect on the understanding of the text. The results of the questionnaire indicated on the other hand, that the most problematic subjects are vocabulary, idioms and proverbs, and the textual cohesion doesn’t cause problems.According to 66% of the participants, the awareness of co-referential items help understand the text. 88.8% of them stated that they found the application beneficial. As a result, the applicants think that learning cohesion items help them comprehend the text.

Keywords: Teaching Reading skills, cohesion, reading difficulties, French language teaching.

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