The Effect of Critical Discourse-Based Instruction on Iranian English Major Students’ Reading Comprehension

This contribution was an attempt to study the impact of critical discourse-based instruction on Iranian English major language learners' in-depth reading. To this target, Fairclough's three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis, with an emphasis on the 10-question model was used. To this end, all undergraduate foreign language students (n=146) including Teaching English as a Foreign Language, English Translation and English Literature at the University of Mazandaran, participated in the study as a sample of Iranian EFL classrooms. The procedure was designed according to the usual pre-test/post-test experimental studies. The experimental groups were taught to explore the masked and covered meanings of the texts in order to explore and discover interrelation of discourse structures and ideological structures of the texts, meanwhile the control groups were studying the same materials conventionally. A post reading ability test was conducted at the end of the course study. The post-test was designed according to the course materials they studied during the instruction. The given scores were analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics and showed that CDA-based instruction significantly affects EFL learners' reading comprehension. And responses to the motivation-related questionnaire depicted that experimental EFL students became very motivated after being familiar with CDA skills.