Tuesday, December 23, 2025
As we mentioned in our last blog post, we’ve spent the last two years trying to gain new teaching knowledge by conducting classroom research with our students. The experience has been an exciting one, with some insightful results that have led us to reconsider our approach to teaching. In this blog post, we will discuss the questions we set out to answer and reveal what the results told us and what this means for our classes.
In our first year, we decided to look at reading. We decided to focus on this skill as many teachers had reported that it was a skill that was getting weaker amongst the majority of our students and one that they had little motivation for in class. After discussing various options, we ended up with the question ‘What pre-reading stage has the greatest effect on reading for detail?’. The three pre-reading stages we tested were lead-in, pre-teaching vocabulary and reading for gist. We’ve been told that these three pre-reading stages are essential in the development of reading skills and that they should all be present in our lessons, but we were curious to find out which of these stages had the greatest impact on students’ reading success.
We put teachers into three groups, and allocated them one pre-reading stage to focus on: lead-in, pre-teaching vocabulary and reading for gist. Within these groups, we then split them into different levels between A2 and C1, so that there would be a range of levels tested for each pre-reading stage. For the reading task, we took two exam texts from the main suite of Cambridge exams that were of the same level of difficultly. We chose reading tasks that were multiple choice comprehension tasks (like B2 First part 5). Teachers had to plan two lessons, one lesson using one text and with all of the pre-reading stages and one with the second text but with the stage missing that they were testing. The idea was to see whether or not the missing stage made any difference to the overall marks obtained by students in this reading task type. Half of the teachers taught a lesson with the missing stage first, and half with the missing stage second. Teachers tested this on one of the groups they normally taught, and these groups did both of the reading tasks.
From the results we obtained in our classes, it seemed that the lead-in was the factor that affected the outcome of the reading for detail the most. In the groups that had to remove this stage, the results were generally lower. The majority of students did better overall in the second reading than the first, despite a pre-reading task being removed (except for one group). Vocabulary pre-teach also had some impact on students’ marks, especially at lower levels. For example, one A2 group saw a 50% increase in marks with the vocabulary pre-teach included, and 16/21 students tested did better with the lead-in at A2 level, so it was difficult to tell really what the key stage was that had led to better results. At most levels, reading for gist didn’t seem to make much difference in students’ overall achievement in the reading for detail task. The repetition of the task played a part in the improvement, as did the topic of the text, which in some cases was much more relevant to students in the second text in comparison to the first.
It appears to be that the most important aspect of reading is student interest in the topic, which is why lead-ins are so important. If some kind of interest is generated before the reading is done, students concentrate more on the text and better results are produced. As we mentioned, in the groups that had to remove this stage, teachers found it incredibly hard to generate any interest in the text and this is why the results were lower. Even though some of the texts weren’t as interesting for students as others, it’s essential for us to engage students in the topic and make sure that there is some kind of ideas and interest generation before conducting the reading task so that students can connect with it. As we found out that most students did better in the second text, we concluded that repetition of task type is important and that if students are frequently exposed to a reading task, their results seem to improve. We were surprised by the fact that reading for gist didn’t seem to make much difference at all, which would lead us to assume that if you are pressed for time in class, then a gist reading of the whole text might be one you could miss out.
In our second year, we considered what we had learnt from our previous research project, and we voted on a number of different options that had been proposed by the teachers. Once again, it seemed that reading was amongst our biggest worries in class, and so we embarked on another experiment based on this skill. However, this time, we focussed on specific reading technique and the question we asked ourselves was ‘How does underlining the reading text have an effect on students’ overall reading performance?’. This experiment was focussed much more on exam reading and how our students could do better under time pressure of an exam and whether underlining/highlighting a text made it easier for them to locate the correct answer. After all, we had been telling our students to do this for years, and we wanted to find out whether, in fact, we were right to do so.
Having learnt from our first experiment, we knew that we had to have a control group this time, with no variables changed and as ‘normal’ a class as possible. We also wanted to expand the experiment to include as many students as possible so that we had a bigger sample size. One of the restrictions we had last time was that we had such a small sample size, that it was difficult to draw definitive conclusions based on the results we obtained. This time, we wanted to involve all of our students, if possible, and make sure that we had enough results to draw a sound conclusion. We took all of the students from A2-C1 and allocated them either group 1, 2 or 3 so that we had even numbers of each and every level. Group 1 were told not to underline, group 2 just underlined the key words in the questions, and group 3 underlined the key words in the question and then where they found the answer in the text. As a control group, we took the marks of the same part of the reading from an exam the students had done a week before the experiment took place, in which they were not told explicitly whether to underline or not.
The results of this experiment were very interesting and also very broad as we had a staggering 573 data items to analyse from the students we had included in the experiment. At lower levels, especially A2, we discovered that underlining the text made very little difference to their overall marks. Teachers reported that timing was an issue and that because students spent longer underlining the text, they were rushing to finish the reading task. This could be down to a lack of practice when it comes to underlining. The same was true for B1; as it took students longer to complete the task whilst underlining the key information, they were rushing to finish it and obtained lower marks overall. However, there was a slight improvement when underlining just the key information in the questions as opposed to the whole text at this level. This changed quite dramatically at B2, when we observed a nearly 5% increase in marks between not underlining at all and underlining both the questions and the answers in the text. At C1, the difference was even greater, with B2+ and C1 students scoring an average of 45% without underlining, but an average mark of 62% when they underlined the questions and the text. There was also over a 10% improvement from the non-underlining group when students just underlined the key information in the questions. As well as underlining, we asked students to report on their reading frequency in any language outside of the classroom. Unsurprisingly, at every level apart from A2, there was an increase in average mark the more they read. At B2, there was a 12% difference in the average mark obtained between those who reported that they never read outside of class and those who said they read frequently.
The results show that those who read more outside of class in whatever language they choose, perform much better overall in reading exams. Therefore, we need to work on encouraging extensive reading, especially amongst those who have reached higher levels such as B2 and C1. When it comes to underlining, it’s clear that at B2 and C1, underlining can make the difference between passing this part of the exam or not. It was also a surprise to see that even just underlining the questions helps students focus on the task more and leads to them performing better overall. Students at these levels should be explicitly told to underline and taught how to do this effectively in order to get better marks. What is difficult is that this is often learnt at lower levels, and what we have seen from the results obtained is that whilst students are learning how to do this, the time it takes them to complete the task is affected. Therefore, it should be reviewed from levels such as A2, so that students can see the importance of it and they should be guided by the teacher on how to make sure they do this efficiently and as quickly as possible. It was also noted that girls generally do better overall than boys in reading and there are many more girls at higher levels, which raises questions about how boys react to reading and how we deal with boys and the skill of reading overall. Perhaps a topic for a future research project!
