ESL teaching and students’ reading

This paper investigates the effects of ESL (English as a Second Language) teaching on third-year secondary education students' reading comprehension.Teaching was studied in terms of an interpersonal and a learning activities perspective.The interpersonal perspective describes teaching in terms of the teacher-student relationship, which is structured in terms of two dimensions: influence (teacher control over communication) and proximity (teacher-student cooperation or opposition).The learning activities perspective describes teaching in terms of the cognitive, affective and regulative learning activities teachers elicit with their students and is structured in terms of three dimensions: person orientation, process orientation and control orientation.Multilevel analyses were used to investigate questionnaire data from 27 ESL teachers (54 classes) and their students.Effects of teaching were corrected for characteristics of students, classes and teachers.Results indicated that teachers' elicitation of learning activities had an effect on students' level of reading comprehension.The effect of teachers' elicitation of learning activities partially overlapped with teaching in terms of the teacher-student interpersonal relationship.A learning process orientation in teaching was positively related to reading comprehension, while a control orientation was negatively related.