Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition Model to Improve EFL Reading Comprehension and Foster Inclusive Education

Abstract

Reading comprehension is of paramount importance in the learning of any language. By using cooperative learning, reading comprehension has been shown to improve significantly, but studies on secondary education students’ reading comprehension are scarce. This work addresses two objectives: to show how the use of reading in cooperative work teams following the CIRC (Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition) model promotes awareness of educational equity and social inclusion and to show how inclusive education, worked through the CIRC cooperative learning model, can help to improve the reading comprehension of secondary education students. To this end, an empirical intervention was carried out with the participation of eighty-one ninth graders, randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group, during a school term of the 2021 to 2022 academic year in an educational center in Madrid. As instruments for data collection, the results obtained in several tests of written and oral comprehension and expression were analyzed. We hypothesize that the use of the CIRC cooperative learning model fosters reasoning and respect while providing an optimal learning framework to improve the reading comprehension necessary in the EFL learning process. The methodological framework is defined as an exploratory comparative experimentation that provides quantitative data analyzed with the statistical program SPSS. The results confirm the hypothesis since there is a significant difference between the scores obtained in favor of the experimental group.