THE EFFECT OF INTENSIVE AUTHENTIC READING TASKS ON READING PERFORMANCE OF ACADEMIC IELTS TEST TAKERS O EFEITO DE TAREFAS INTENSIVAS DE LEITURA AUTÊNTICA NO DESEMPENHO DE LEITURA DOS PARTICIPANTES DO TESTE IELTS ACADÊMICO EL EFECTO DE LAS TAREAS INTENSIVAS DE LECTURA AUTÉNTICA EN EL RENDIMIENTO DE LECTURA DE LOS EXAMINADOS ACADÉMICOS IELTS

This study aimed at investigating the effect of employing intensive reading (IR) authentic tasks as supplementary materials on reading comprehension development of Academic IELTS test takers within the framework of schema theory and three instructional models of reading strategies suggested by Pearson and Duke (2009). Participants of this study consist of 81 individuals comprising 41 male and 40 female language learners at pre-advanced level of English proficiency with the age range of 25 to 37 among which 42 were categorized as the experimental group which received IR treatment and the rest of 39 ,who are considered as control group, that did not receive IR treatment. The experimental group was further divided into two subgroups which each received the same IR authentic tasks with different instructional methods to teaching reading strategies. The results of an ANCOVA analysis illustrated a significant positive influence of authentic IR treatments on the development of participants' reading comprehension skills. However, an independent one-way ttest revealed that Pearson's and Duke's (2009) various instructional methods were not significantly influential on participants' final reading proficiency development.

Resumen: Este estudio tuvo como objetivo investigar el efecto de emplear tareas auténticas de lectura intensiva (IR) como materiales complementarios en el desarrollo de la comprensión lectora de los examinados IELTS académicos en el marco de la teoría de esquemas y tres modelos de estrategias de lectura sugeridos por Pearson y Duke (2009). Los participantes de este estudio constan de 81 individuos que comprenden 41 estudiantes de idiomas masculinos y 40 femeninos en un nivel de dominio del inglés pre-avanzado con un rango de edad de 25 a 37 entre los cuales 42 fueron categorizados como el grupo experimental que recibió tratamiento con IR y el resto de 39 , que se consideran como grupo control, que no recibieron tratamiento con IR. El grupo experimental se dividió además en dos subgrupos que recibieron cada uno las mismas tareas auténticas de IR con diferentes métodos de instrucción para enseñar estrategias de lectura. Los resultados de un análisis ANCOVA ilustraron una influencia positiva significativa de los tratamientos auténticos de IR en el desarrollo de las habilidades de comprensión lectora de los participantes. Sin embargo, una prueba t unidireccional independiente reveló que los diversos métodos de instrucción de Pearson y Duke (2009) no influyeron significativamente en el desarrollo de la competencia final en lectura de los participantes.

INTRODUCTION
Over the last two centuries English language plays a crucial role in human beings lives since the world has been moving toward globalization through which people need a common language to make communication possible across the globe. English language is an integral part of lives of individuals engaged in international programs in various ways. As Matsuda (2018) pints out, noticeable number of students and scholars prefer to move to different parts of the world to study, research, or teach with the aim of expanding their knowledge and abilities not just in their field of study but in their sociocultural communicative abilities to maintain successful intercultural communications to achieve their international and personal goals. This aim would not be achievable unless members of a community attain an acceptable level of language proficiency to make efficient communications possible.
This fact accentuates the importance of various English proficiency tests, administrated to applicants for various educational programs, in order to indicate linguistic communicative skills of language users required to succeed in a program.
International English Language Testing System, known as IELTS, is one of the most standardized and valid English proficiency tests which is required and recognized by most international educational systems across the world. The IELTS test is launched in 1980 by the Cambridge English Language Assessment and British Council and is administrated in two versions of IELTS Academic and IELTS General for two different sets of purposes. The Academic version is for the test takers who want to study in an English-speaking context and the general version is for the test takers who are not mainly pursuing any academic objectives. The IElTS scores are reported as "band scores" on a scale of 0 (did not attempt the test) to 9 (expert user) for each section of the test including listening, reading, writing, and speaking.
Since, as Block's and Israel's (2005) state, among the main four skills, reading proficiency is proved to be significantly related to participants' achievements in both their personal and professional lives, in this study my main focus is on improving reading scores of the Academic IELTS test takers.

READING COMPREHENSION SKILLS AND STRATEGIES
Reading comprehension is defined by Pearson (2002) as a continuous and complex activity which successful readers conceptualize as a productive activity. The most significant reading strategies presented in the literature of EFL studies embraces six main techniques including predicting, visualizing, making connections, summarizing, questioning, and inferring. Each of these strategies are discussed in brief in the subsequent paragraphs since these strategies, as, Pearson (2002) believes, are somehow interwoven and interrelated to each other and also I used three of them as the main teaching strategies employed in this research.
Predicting helps readers to set a purpose for their readings and it has been proven that more successful readers make prediction and set ideas frequently as they read (Block & Israel, 2005).
Through prediction learners develop comprehension competency and interaction ability with other students in a communicative teaching context (Oczkus, 2003). Some prediction strategies employed in reading comprehension classes include predicting through the topic of the text; predicting with partners, using pictures and key words of the text.
Another reading strategy is visualization (Adler, 2001) that requires readers to construct an image of what is being read. In this strategy teachers can encourage learners to visualize settings, characters, and actions presented in a piece of writing. Making connection is another reading strategy that is in the framework of the schema theory in which the learner is to connect the ideas in the text with their prior knowledge to make sense of the whole content. Widdowson (1983) defines schema as an important aspect of cognitive science illuminating how people organize, process, and store information in their long-term memory. Other studies elaborated that schema theory describes the ways people use their background knowledge to make sense of new events, stimuli, and situations (Vacca & Vacca, 1999;Rumelhart, 1977). Making connection strategy could be employed through text-to-text connections, i.e., when the learners make connections between the current text and the prior texts they have already read ;or in can be used through text-to-self connection which is making connection to the prior knowledge and self-experiences of a person (Teele, 2004).
To make a better understanding of a text, a reader could be asked to summarize the important contents of the text in their own words. This reading strategy, called summarization, is proved to be effective in enabling readers to distinguish the main ideas from the supporting ideas (Adler, 2001).
Questioning learners about the text before, during, and after the reading session is a reading strategy through which readers learn comprehend meaning, solve problems, find information, and even discover new information about the topic of the reading. By using this strategy students learn how to activate their prior knowledge and distinguish between their background knowledge and new ideas presented in the reading task so they develop better reading comprehension competency (Harvey &Goudvis, 2000).
Reading between the lines is another reading strategy, which is called referring, that requires learners to use their general knowledge along with information from the text in order to attain a conclusion (Serafini, 2004). Through this strategy students will be able to draw conclusions, make predictions, use information and pictures and graphs to create meaning from text (Harvey & Goudvis, 2000). In this research I employed making connection, questioning, and inferring reading strategies through an instructional model suggested by Pearson and Duke (2009) which is framed through considering the characteristics of good readers. Good readers in the literature are defined as active readers with clear goals in mind for what they are reading. They frequently make predictions while reading and try to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words in the text using their prior knowledge so they can integrate their prior knowledge with material in the text.
In suggesting an instructional model of reading comprehension strategy, Pearson and Duke (2009) described five components as: 1. Describing the strategy to the learners explicitly and explaining when and how it should be used.
2. Teachers and students modeling of the strategy in action and putting the strategy into practice while teaching the learners.
3. Collaborative use of the strategy in action as the teacher is one of the learners and practices the strategy with them simultaneously and collaboratively in the classroom. 4. Guided practice using the strategy with gradual release of responsibility.
5. Independent use of the strategy which is more used in silent reading.
To apply these instructional models of reading strategies this research has focused on the effect of Intensive reading approach on participants' reading proficiency development. Intensive reading and Extensive reading are two main approaches employed in developing reading skills of language learners in recent years. These approaches are proved to be tremendously effective in helping learners improve vocabulary, word recognition, and also in developing better reading comprehension skills (Coady,1979). To provide an opportunity for lexical and grammatical improvement in reading comprehension tasks, Intensive Reading (hereafter IR) is mostly employed as it primarily deals with comprehension at lexical and syntactic level (Richards & Schmidt ,2002).
Extensive reading on the other hand focuses on reading in a large scale in order to gain general understanding of what is read which helps learners develop fluency in reading with very low effect on vocabulary and grammatical achievement (Nation, 2004).
The main focus of this study is on employing IR since IELTS test takers are to be tested on their vocabulary and grammatical proficiency and IR has been introduced in the body of the EFL/ESL literature as an efficient teaching method which "calls attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers, and other surface structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning, implications, rhetorical relationships, and the like" (Brown, 1994). Correspondingly Long and Richards (1987) refer to IR as "detailed in-class" analysis which is mainly directed by the instructors with the aim of teaching vocabulary and grammar points, in a short passage." Palmer (1921) emphasizes that intensive reading should be employed when reading an article requires concentration and attention in order to attain some detailed information from it. Similarly in recent studies intensive reading is described as a method of reading which involves reading through a text meticulously word by word sentence by sentence form the beginning of the text to the end (Rashidi & Piran, 2011). Therefore, this method of reading provides opportunity for learners to achieve new vocabularies and grammatical structures as an effective teaching method for reading comprehension skills (Macalister, 2011).The main goals of intensive reading as Macalister (2011) explains include concentrating on helping students expand their lexical and grammatical knowledge and helping them learn and develop new reading skills such as making inferences, and identifying main ideas. IR also helps students to stay focused on the text and make good transitions from one word to another which makes the process of reading comprehension more efficient. To make the IR course effective, Mac Leod (2017) suggests that materials used for IR tasks should be short with  Anderson's (1999), Ying's (1998), Paran 's(2003), works.
This research is implementing IR as a supplementary treatment course to improve reading comprehension skill of the participants; but the IR tasks chosen for this study are all aimed to be authentic as among all the research performed on the effect of different reading materials on reading comprehension skill of EFL learners, Pearson (2009) clearly expresses the lack of enough research exploring the efficiency of authentic texts. He openly expresses his idea as "we are guilty of routinely recommending that students read "real texts for real purposes" in the course of their reading comprehension instruction, although there is little or no research to support this recommendation directly" (Pearson, 2009;12).
Authentic reading texts have been defined in the literate as real life texts which are not prepared for pedagogic purposes which represent a vast variety of writing styles employed by the speakers of the target language expressing information about the target culture and native speakers' contextual perspective on different topics and events (Wallac, 1992). Authentic texts are written for native speakers and are produced to fulfill some social purposes in a language community (Peacock, 1997). They act as a rich source of input for professional users of a language which is "written by members of a language and culture group for members of the same language and culture group" (Galloway, 1998, p. 133, as cited in Glisan). The necessity of working on authentic materials becomes even more noticeable when we look at the outcome of the research with a tremendous positive effect of authentic materials on motivation and language proficiency development of learners of different languages. A good example in this area would be the study of Boyaci's and Guner's (2018) which explored the impact of authentic task-based materials on reading comprehension, writing skills, and motivation of language learners during a Turkish language course in a primary school which the results showed an obvious positive effect of using authentic materials on the development of reading comprehension and writing skills of the participants.
The artificial nature of simplified pedagogical materials made them beneficial for preparing learners for eventual reading of real texts in real life; therefore, the final destination of language pedagogy is facing authentic materials (Widdowson, 1983).Authentic reading involves second language learners in the same sort of activities as they read in their first language so authenticity is what language learners should achieve as a final result (Widdowson, 1983). The main reason for not using authentic materials for EFL learners is to make sure that instructional materials fit the learners' level of language proficiency to make the input comprehensible so learners could expand their language skills (Krashen, 1989). Therefore, in order to make authentic reading comprehensible for the language learners, selecting applicable authentic materials is of great importance which should be carefully done by the instructors (Hu & Nation 2000).
Evaluating materials for a proficient authentic reading mostly involves estimating the number of unknown words with regard to the learners' level of proficiency which, as Hu and Nation (2000) indicated, is somewhere around two percent of the words in a text. This means if two percent of the lexical items of a text are unfamiliar, still a reasonable level of comprehension is anticipated. Therefore, to make authentic reading a profitable and motivating experience, teachers should employ vocabulary teaching strategies along with reading strategies particularly for learners of lower levels of language proficiency (Nation, 2006).

Nation (2004) elaborates that intensive reading involves two main goals of comprehending
the content of the text and learning new vocabularies which these goals could be well-accomplished through ten methods of dealing with new vocabularies during intensive reading including 1. Preteaching new vocabularies, i.e., spending some time describing the meaning of the new words to the learners before starting the reading session.
2. Replacing new lexical items with simpler ones by the teacher before handing the text to the learners.

Put them in a glossary
4. Put them in an exercise after the reading text 5. Quickly give the meaning of the unknown words to the learners to fasten the reading process 6. Do nothing about the unknown words and encourage students to use scaffolding strategies and contextual clues.
7. Provide the learners with some contextual clues to help them guess the meanings.
8. Encourage leaners to use a dictionary. 9. Break the intensive text into parts and explain the unknown words through using part of speech of the unknown lexical items.
10. Interrupting the reading session to explain the range of meaning of the unknown words collocations as much as needed by the learners (Nation, 2004).
Among the methods suggested by Nation (2004), in order to facilitate authentic IR procedure in this study, the predicted unknown lexical items were put in a glossary and were handed to the participants prior to the IR session. The criteria for choosing a particular word to be put in the glossary were based on Nation's (2004) recommendation which encompass three main characteristics: First, the word should be a high frequency word and will probably repeat in further readings, second, it is a useful technical word, and third, the meaning of the chosen vocabulary is vital for the message of the text.
The theoretical framework of a research conducted by Sevilla-Morales (2017) interested me in that his study revealed a positive effect of scaffolded reading on the participants' performance in English National Exit Exams (ENEEs) within the framework of schema theory, scaffolded reading comprehension, and intensive reading as a combined theoretical framework. This combination led me to base my study on a similar theoretical framework as follows.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
This study is conducted within the framework of the schema theory and five instructional methods of Pearson and Duke (2009) on reading strategies including describing the strategy to the learners explicitly, teachers and students modeling of the strategy in action, guided practice using the strategy with gradual release of responsibility, collaborative use of the strategy in action as the teacher is one of the learners, and independent use of the strategy which is more used in silent reading.
Since the results of Shen's (2008) study on the effect of learners' prior knowledge on the topics of IR treatments in the framework of schema theory shows a significant difference in the improvement of reading comprehension competency, guiding learners to activate their prior knowledge while reading, called making connection (Pearson & Duke 2009), and questioning and inferring reading strategies are employed as framework methods in this study.
Within this framework, the present study seeks to answer the following questions: 1. Does authentic IR treatment make a significant difference in pre-advanced EFL learners' reading performance on the IELTS exam? 2. Does applying different instructional methods applied to the same reading strategies make a significant difference in pre-advanced EFL learners' reading performance on the IELTS test?

PARTICIPANTS
Participants of this study consist of 81 individuals comprising 41 male and 40 female language learners with the age range of 25 to 37, holding bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science, microbiology, psychology, architecture, interior designing, nursing, mechanical engineering, and accounting enrolled in an IELTS preparation program course in 2018.
Among the whole 81 participants, 42 of them, including 21 females and 20 males, agreed to attend the treatment authentic IR classes which I refer to as the experimental group. The rest of 39 subjects, including 19 female and 20 male, agreed to participate in my study without undergoing the treatment IR sessions which I refer to as the control group.
Participants were of pre-advanced level of English proficiency among whom 36 had sat a real academic IELTS test before the enrolment time of the course and 45 of them sat a mock academic IELTS test before the beginning of the course. The range of the scores obtained by them were from 4.5 up to 5.5 in the reading section.
All the participants voluntarily chose to take part in my study and give their written consents after hearing a brief explanation about the procedure.

MATERIAL
The main reading materials used in the classes for the both experimental and control groups were Cambridge Reading Texts for IELTS Preparation and Cambridge IELTS Practice text books which are not considered authentic. The extra treatment authentic IR texts which were only applied to the experimental group consist of extracted short texts from online newspapers and tabloids, mostly from the Herald, the Guardian, and the Times with approximately 15 to 20 lines for each texts.
Some other ones were chosen from the website of "Breaking News Lessons" on which the news were categorized according to various levels of English language proficiency, ranging from zero to six, sourcing from the Guardian, the Independent, the Metro news, the Hill, the BBC, and the CBC news.
The IR texts employed in this research were chosen directly by the instructor of the experimental group who was the researcher of this study. The content of the chosen IR authentic texts were mostly on political, natural, social, healthcare, and cultural issues as these topics were the most familiar to the learners and would be the most efficient topics to activate participants' prior knowledge to make study feasible within the framework of the schema theory.
At the end of the each of the tasks a multiple-choice quiz was added including 5 questions related to the content of the authentic texts, prepared by the instructor, to make the task more challenging for the participants.

PROCEDURE
This study was performed at the institute of Tehran-IElTS in Tehran /Iran in November2018 during a co-educational program in which both male and female participants engaged in the research simultaneously in the same classes with the same instructors.
Only the participants from the experimental group attended 45-minute complementary authentic IR sessions after the reading sessions that all of the participants attended for 6 weeks covering two meetings a week.
Reading strategies applied to the both experimental and control groups included guiding learners to activate their prior knowledge while reading, referred to as making connection within the schema theory, questioning about the main topic, and inferring meaning.
In order to facilitate authentic IR sessions for the experimental group, with regard to dealing with new vocabularies, the instructor followed Nation's (2004) suggested lexical instructional strategies as putting estimated unknown lexical items in a glossary with a brief definition for each item. The glossaries were handed to the participants at the beginning of each complementary IR sessions. They were allowed to go over the glossary and ask questions before starting the IR task.
They were also permitted to use a dictionary anytime needed.
The experimental group was further divided into two subgroups, including 21 participants in each subgroups, in order to be taught with different instructional methods applied to the same reading strategies to investigate the possible effect of different instructional methods suggested by Pearson and Duke (2009).
For the first experimental subgroup, EXP1, reading strategies of making connection with the prior knowledge, questioning and inferring meaning from the text were taught through the methods of describing the strategies explicitly to the students and modeling in action. In this subgroup the instructor collaboratively applied the reading strategies in action with the learners.
For the second subgroup of the experimental participants, EXP2, the same reading strategies applied to EXP1 were taught through the instructional methods of guided using of the reading strategies with gradual release of teacher's responsibility and independent use of strategies.
For the both EXP1 and EXP2 subgroups the same authentic texts were used throughout this study. At the end of the semester all of the participants were asked to sit an Academic IELTS mock test just for the reading comprehension section. An ANCOVA analysis of the pre-test and post-test results show that participants whom received IR (both EXP1 and EXP2) have achieved higher scores than the participants who have not received this complementary treatment. The effect of IR showed to be of %43 percent influential. The effect of using instructional methods of explicitly describing reading strategies to the students and collaborative teaching on reading comprehension of the EXP1 group is shown to be significantly positive when comparing the post test results of EXP1 and the control group with the effect degree of 38%. The effect of teaching strategy through guided practice with gradual release of responding and independent teaching performed on EXP2 showed to be significantly effective method as the results of ANCOVA analysis showed a significant difference between the final results of EXP2 and the control group. P á g i n a | 14 In order to find out whether the effectiveness of the teaching methods used for EXP1 and EXP2 are of significant difference an independent sample t-test was run between the posttest results of EXP1 and EXP2 . The results showed that even though the mean of the posttest results of EXP2 is more than EXP1 but there is no statistically significant difference in the posttest results of EXP1 and EXP2. This means that there is not a significant difference between the effect of teaching methods used for EXP1 and EXP2 groups.