An analysis of the theories and a case study for teaching EFL reading with the use of socioaffective strategies

사회감정전략을 이용한 영어독해수업 모형제시를 위한 이론 및 사례연구 분석

The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the theories concerning socioaffective strategies, to analyze the dialogues of the students negotiating for meaning of a reading material and to suggest some implications of socioaffective strategies for teaching reading. The examination of the theories - the interaction hypothesis and the sociocultural theory - suggest that the use of socioaffective strategies facilitates more effective understanding of information that is to be found. distributed, and taken in among the participants. The discourse analyses of the students' interaction in a Korean college English reading class show ample evidence of the use of socioaffective strategies that helped them understand the meaning of a text. However, the analyses show that the strategies are mostly used to ask questions concerning the meaning of clauses. Only few analytical questions are raised for some structural and pragmatical features in the text which are crucial to the understanding of its meaning. Imbalance also exists in the types of the questions used by the participants. The analyses indicate that, instead of negotiating more interactively, the students tend to rely upon a more advanced student when they face difficult English sentences. Therefore as a conclusion this paper emphasizes the importance of teaching socioaffective strategies to help students to help themselves to become more cooperative, independent and analytical in reading English texts.