Problem Analysis

PROBLEM

What is reading comprehension failure?

Comprehension failure is either failing to understand the words or the idea of the reading content. Reading comprehension closely relate to personal experience, and comprehension failure can easily happened when the content does not overlap with the reader’s prior experience; even though students may know all the words in the sentences, they still cannot understand the meaning of the text.

Why do international students have reading trouble?

I conducted research among 55 international students at SCAD. The research questions are designed to find out the answer to following questions:

1. Does a Chinese international student encounter reading comprehension failure?

2. Does reading comprehension matter to international students?

3. What causes the reading understanding problem?

INSIGHT

1. Reading comprehension failure commonly happens among Chinese international students.

2. Vocabulary size is the most important reason cause reading comprehension failure.

3. The language barrier causes difficulty during the reading process.

Today, almost all universities set language exams such as the TOEFL, IELTS as a prerequisite for international students. In order to study abroad, students will prepare for those exams to testify their ability to learn in an English language environment. There are many online software and lectures that are made for preparing for the exam; however, college students are still facing many language obstacles during college no matter how high their score is on the language test. The reason behind this is that the software and lectures that are used to prepare for the exam are only exam-oriented; they don’t really aim to improve the student’s English ability but to tell them how to answer the questions correctly. As a consequence, students with high language scores are still having trouble with reading comprehension in an English-speaking environment.

Pain points

1. Students are hard to concentrate during the textbook reading practice.

2. Too many novel words disturb students’ reading process.

3. The online lecture could not care for every student, teachereing showing the answer of the reading while few students still wondering the answer, many students cannot fully participate in the lecture.

4. Students are learning the reading strategy instead of understanding the reading content.

How might we make the language teaching software to be more meaningful and helpful to Chinese international students?

Reciprocal teaching strategy

SOLUTION

1. Question Board

2. Vocabulary Definition

Interaction Design

Integrate these four elements into the reading practice system

MAIN FLOWS

Prototype link

VALIDATION

To validate whether the reciprocal strategy is effective to enhance students’ comprehension, I conduct the experiment among two groups: the control group and the experiment group. To prepare for the validation, I created a prototype from my high-fidelity interface, and I shared it with the 12 students by email link. The prototype is divided into two parts: the first part is the discussion, while the second part is the test.

Reading material

The reading and the test material were selected from the TOEFL official website. It is a practice reading set for all people to experience the TOEFL test. The practice reading set consists of three readings; each reading has 10 questions.  I also downloaded a performance descriptor from the TOEFL official website that is used to measure the level of reading comprehension.