A study on the improvements in reading outcome of EFL learners taking the intensive IELTS exam preparation course at AMES english language center

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES ********************* ĐẶNG THU HƯƠNG A STUDY ON THE IMPROVEMENTS IN READING OUTCOME OF EFL LEARNERS TAKING THE INTENSIVE IELTS EXAM PREPARATION COURSE AT AMES ENGLISH LANGUAGE CENTER Nghiên cứu mức độ tiến với kỹ Đọc học viên sau tham gia khóa học luyện thi chứng IELTS Học viện Anh ngữ AMES M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 8140231.01 Hanoi, 2018 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES ********************* ĐẶNG THU HƯƠNG A STUDY ON THE IMPROVEMENTS IN READING OUTCOME OF EFL LEARNERS TAKING THE INTENSIVE IELTS EXAM PREPARATION COURSE AT AMES ENGLISH LANGUAGE CENTER Nghiên cứu mức độ tiến với kỹ Đọc học viên sau tham gia khóa học luyện thi chứng IELTS Học viện Anh ngữ AMES M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Teaching Methodology Code: 8140231.01 Supervisor: Prof Dr Nguyễn Hoà Hanoi, 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to my respectable supervisor, Prof Dr Nguyen Hoa for his restless and sympathetic encouragement, valuable advice and patient guidance until the completion of this study My sincere thanks also go to my dear colleagues at AMES Language Center for all their help, support and encouragement when I encountered difficulties I wish to acknowledge my thankfulness to the two IELTS preparation classes for their enthusiastic participation in the project Finally, I am deeply indebted to my beloved parents, my daughter, my siblings, and my post-graduate friends for their sacrifice, encouragement and care i ABSTRACT In recent time, there has been an increasing number of those who want to sit an IELTS test to get a desirable score for their academic, recruitment or admission purposes This has resulted in the fact that many private English language schools in Vietnam have included IELTS preparation courses in their training program These schools usually state strongly about the effectiveness of their IELTS preparation classes; however, there has been little investigation on this so far This study is intended to explore the improvements made by IELTS learners in terms of (1) their reading comprehension & test-taking strategies, and (2) their IELTS Reading band scores The participants selected for the study included 30 learners from two IELTS reading preparation classes at AMES English language center in Hanoi Through the instruments of pre-and post-tests, survey questionnaires and interviews for learners, the study discovered that after taking a 42-hour preparation course, the learners have well mastered the IELTS reading strategies, which have resulted in their significant improvement in IELTS Reading band scores In addition, regarding the explicit strategy instruction given, the students felt welcome as they could see that the improvements they achieved are mainly attributed by the teacher‘s careful modeling and instruction for each type of questions in the IELTS Reading Test ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i ABSTRACT .ii TABLE OF CONTENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES vi PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 Rationale for the Study Aims and Objectives of the Study Research Questions Methodology of the Study Scope of the study Significance of the study Organization of the study PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW I Reading and reading comprehension Reading Reading process Reading comprehension II Reading Strategies Reading strategies Strategy use and reading results 10 III Strategy Instruction 10 Strategy instruction in previous literature 10 Strategy instruction procedures 11 The roles of modelling and scaffolding in strategy instruction 14 Contextualization and explicitness in strategy instruction 14 iii IV The IELTS Reading Test 15 What is IELTS? 15 IELTS Academic Reading 17 IELTS Reading strategies 18 V Test preparation 19 Definition of test preparation 19 Types of test preparation 20 Previous studies on improvements of learners at test preparation language courses 21 VI Review of previous studies on reading comprehension strategies among Vietnamese learners 21 CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 23 I Context of the study 23 Setting of the study 23 The IELTS Intensive Reading Course 23 II Research Questions 26 III Methodology 27 Participants 27 Instruments 29 IV Procedures of data analysis 31 CHAPTER 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 32 I Results addressing research question 1: Improvements on IELTS reading strategies 32 I Reading strategies with highest and lowest ratings before and after the course 33 II Reading strategies with highest and lowest gains and gains in groups of strategies36 III Results from the open-ended questions 38 II Results addressing research question 2: Improvements on IELTS band scores 40 III Results addressing research question 3: Learners‘ attitudes towards the explicit reading strategy instruction 42 iv Results from open-ended questions in questionnaires 42 Results from qualitative data – Interview with high-score and low-score achieving students 44 IV Summary 44 PART C: CONCLUSION 45 Conclusion 45 Implications of the study 46 Limitations of the study 46 Suggestions for further study 46 REFERENCES 48 APPENDICES 54 v LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES Table How IELTS Academic Reading module is scored .17 Table IELTS Reading Course with explicit strategy instruction 26 Table Occupation and exposure to English of learners .28 Table Reasons for taking IELTS Test of the learners 28 Table Comparison of reading strategies used by learners before and after the Reading Intensive Course 33 Table The highest rated reading strategies before and after the course 35 Table The lowest rated reading strategies before and after the course 36 Table Reading strategies with highest and lowest gains after the course .36 Table Average of mean and gain of reading strategies in groups 37 Table 10 IELTS reading pre- and post-test scores 40 Figure Learner strategies training cycle 13 Figure The IELTS Academic Procedures and Components 16 Figure Students' biggest problem with IELTS Reading Test before the course 39 Figure Students' biggest improvements in reading after the course .39 Figure Number of students with different gains in the IELTS Reading Test .41 vi PART A: INTRODUCTION Rationale for the Study On the global basis, the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) is generally recognized as an international benchmark of proficiency in English Scores on IELTS are widely used as a part of recruitment or admission procedures set by educational institutions, employers, professional registration bodies and government immigration agencies IELTS candidature, in particular, has witnessed a rapid growth in recent years with over 1.5 million test-takers every year including thousands of Vietnamese candidates To meet the demands of the IELTS preparation market and help more and more candidates succeed in the IELTS test, private language schools in big cities like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City which offer corresponding IELTS preparation courses are developing at an accelerating rate The IELTS test consists of two modules: the Academic and General training modules As the Academic module is designed for those seeking admission to undergraduate and postgraduate courses like all the participants involved in this essay, this study focuses on the Academic reading module From personal observation, the researcher realized that many Vietnamese learners of English, in general, and pre-intermediate students at American English School (AMES), a private English language school in Hanoi, Vietnam, in particular, after several years of learning English, turn out to be word-by-word readers That is to say, students construct the meaning of the text by decoding at word and sentence levels When encountering long and complicated reading passages of the IELTS Academic reading module, students are confused about the way to achieve understanding and gain information from the text They tend to read very slowly making an attempt to understand the meaning of every single word, or they hardly show any effort to guess meanings of unknown lexis from reading context In addition, they frequently try to translate the reading passages into Vietnamese As a result, many of them fail to finish the test under the constraint of time In other cases, students lose marks for not paying attention to the number of words required for the reading task One possible explanation for the above-mentioned problems is that they are not equipped with adequate and efficient reading strategies even though students have already acquired a range of vocabulary and grammar after years of learning English Teaching and learning to read effectively under the test condition is a central issue in most IELTS reading preparation courses in language schools However, there is a dearth of studies analyzing the progress of these EFL learners after taking such courses in Vietnam As a result, this study is an attempt to investigate whether the intensive reading preparation course can be effective in raising the learners‘ awareness, encouraging their use of the strategies and improving their IELTS band scores of the Academic Reading module This will hopefully give an insight into the potential of explicit strategy instruction in extending the range of reading strategies that learners can employ in the domain of IELTS reading and it can also assist teachers and educators in reviewing IELTS teaching methodology and EFL teaching in general Aims and Objectives of the Study This research is carried out with the aim of assessing the level of learners‘ improvements on academic reading performance in the IELTS test after taking the intensive preparation course at American English School (AMES) In other words, by comparing the input and output of one learner and comparing the outputs among learners, the research will evaluate the effectiveness of the IELTS reading course at AMES which is based on explicit reading comprehension strategies and test-taking strategies; whether it could offer candidates an efficient preparation and improve chances for learners to gain high scores in the real test Conjugant with the above-mentioned aim, there are a number of research objectives required to work on They are presented as follows: - Define reading comprehension, reading strategies, reading strategy instruction, describe their characteristics, and present several models of classification Resource 2: Using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage, complete each gap in the diagram The many uses of the Moringa tree The Moringa tree, Saragwa, or Drumstick tree, is relatively unknown in the West, despite the fact that it is incredibly useful Miriam Tayne reports about its culinary, medicinal and other uses The Moringa tree is a relatively small tree that typically grows to between three and ten metres tall Its flowers are creamy-coloured and have been compared to small orchids The plant has long and round green pods that can grow to 30 cms and which look a bit like drumsticks, hence the tree's common name The pods consist of three parts, which contain round, dark brown seeds Planting needs to be done in sandy or muddy soil, using these seeds or tree cuttings The plant does not tolerate frost but thrives in hot climates It is very common in South and South-east Asia, Africa and America The leaves are reputed to have anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial properties, so are used for eye and ear infections, fevers, etc They are also held against the forehead to reduce headaches, or made into tea to treat stomach complaints As they contain a lot of iron they have been used for the treatment of anaemia, a medical condition in which there are too few red cells in the blood, causing tiredness The plant also contains many other nutrients, such as phosphorus, calcium, potassium, and vitamins A and C The ground-up seeds are commonly used to treat certain skin infections, but can be used for much more Ground seeds can be mixed with salt or oils to apply to the body to treat cramp, back ache and forms of arthritis, a medical condition in which the joints are swollen and painful The oil, called Ben oil because it contains behenic acid, is also used as a hair treatment or a perfume, and to deter mosquitoes and treat their bites The by-products of the oil manufacturing process are used for fertilization and water purification The roots work in exactly the same way as the seeds, but are much stronger, so are not used as often They have additional uses for heart and circulation problems, whereas the gum is sometimes used to treat asthma The bark has quite a pleasant taste and is sometimes eaten to encourage digestion The plant's main use is as food: for livestock, and for human beings, because it contains high concentrations of fibre and protein The drumsticks are eaten in soup and/or as green 90 beans, often in combination with shrimp (see picture), whereas the seeds are eaten like peas, or roasted The leaves are eaten fresh or cooked in similar ways to spinach Chopped, they are used as a garnish on soups and salads They are often pickled or dried so that they are always available to use in sauces, stir-fries, soups and in sweet and sour or spicy curries Like every other part of the tree, its flowers are not just decorative but also functional They taste a bit like wild mushrooms and are considered a delicacy They are used to make tea to treat the common cold, mixed with honey to make cough medicine, and made into juice to be drunk during breastfeeding as it is said to increase milk flow There is not a part of the tree that is not used The Moringa tree is probably the most beneficial tree in the world 91 92 FOLLOW-UP EXERCISES EXERCISE Label the diagram below Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer ZINACANTAN The rural village of Zinacantan, situated high in the hills of southern Mexico, is inhabited by people descended from the ancient Mayans The villages of this area are unique and interesting in terms of their traditions and lifestyle A typical house has only two rooms: one large room, which serves as both a living room and a bedroom, and a small kitchen leading off this room A typical home would have a row of bed along one wall, and three or four chairs in the middle of the room from which the family can watch the television; in the kitchen there is an open fire in the centre of the room, a bench for grinding corn and two large storage bins in the corner A wide variety of crops are cultivated on the surrounding land, including herbs near the kitchen, and fruit trees beyond this On the outer edge of the property the family would grow sugarcane 93 EXERCISE Label the diagram using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage below to each blank space one of the first devices to use the power of used to pump water from mines A boiler, encased in brick and sitting over a coal fire, generated steam, whichdrovethepiston in the open top cylinder above the boiler When the steam built up, the pressure opened a valve allowing the steam to fill the cylinder, the first valve was closed and the second valve opened This second valve sprayed cold water into the cylinder from a vacuum The air pressure from the opentop cylinder pushed the piston down again, thus pulling the rod down with it The cycle ten EXERCISE THE POWER OF WATER Most hydropower plants rely on a dam that holds back water, creating a large reservoir behind it Often, this reservoir is used as a recreational lake and is also known as the intake Gates on the dam open and gravity pulls the water through the penstock, a line of pipe that leadsto the turbine Water builds up pressure as it flows through this pipe The water strikes and turns the large blades of a turbine, which is attached to a generator above it by way of a 94 shaft As the turbine blades turn, so a series of magnets inside the generator producing alternating current (AC) by moving electrons The transformer, located inside the powerhouse, takes the AC and converts it to higher-voltage current Complete the chart below Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORDS from Reading Passage for each answer 95 PRACTICE PRACTICE COFFEE RUST Why the British drink so much tea? The answer to this question can be traced back, unexpectedly, to a humble fungus, HEMILEIA vastatrix, which attacks the leaves of coffee plants causing a disease popularly known as coffee rust The appearance of this disease was first reported in the British colony of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1867 Over the next twenty years, coffee production in Asia and Africa was virtually wiped out Following a period of severe economic and social upheaval, planters in British colonies shifted to planting tea, and the British were gradually transformed into a nation of tea drinkers Under British rule, the island of Ceylon was stripped of its forests to turn over every available acre to coffee production By the 1870s, Ceylon was exporting nearly 100 million pounds of coffee a year, much of it to England This empire, however, was swiftly devastated by the arrival of the coffee rust fungus The rust organism can be recognized by the presence of yellowish powdery lesions on the undersides of the leaves of the coffee plant Occasionally green shoots and even the green coffee berries can be infected The infected leaves drop prematurely, leaving long expanses of bare twigs This defoliation causes shoots and roots to starve and consequently to die back, reducing the number of nodes on which coffee can be produced the following season The rust fungus is dispersed by both wind and rain By observing the patterns of infection on individual leaves, it can be deduced that splashing rain is the most important means of local, or short-range dispersal Dispersal over wider areas is primarily by wind, although insects such as flies and wasps may also play a small part How the fungus first made its way from its native Ethiopia to Ceylon is unknown, but human intervention seems to be the only plausible explanation Insects as carriers can be ruled out, and it is doubtful whether the fungus could have been blown so far The coffee growers probably hoped at first that the disease would disappear as quickly and unaccountably as it had begun By 1879, however, it was clear that it was not going away, and the Ceylon government made an appeal for someone to be sent to help The British Government responded by sending Harry Marshall Ward, whose brief was to investigate the coffee rust phenomenon and hopefully come up with a cure Ward recommended that to effectively protect the plant from invasion, the leaves should be treated with a coating of fungicide (lime-sulphur) Unfortunately in the case of the 96 Ceylon plantations, the rust epidemic was too well established for this protective measure to save the coffee trees He also pointed out the risks of intensive monoculture The continuous planting of coffee trees over the island, without even the benefit of windbreaks, had created a perfect environment for a fungus epidemic to spread Despite Ward's warning, when the coffee trees were replaced with tea brushes, they were planted at the same density It was only by good fortune that no similar fungus arrived to invade the tea bushes and that improved fungicides were soon available to protect the crop With the destruction of the coffee plantations in Ceylon and subsequent arrival of coffee rust in Java and Sumatra, the world's coffee production shifted to the Americas Plantations were swiftly established in the tropical highlands of Brazil, Colombia, and Central America, and Brazil soon became the world's major coffee supplier, closely followed by Colombia Coffee rust was successfully excluded from the Americas for over 100 years by careful quarantine measures However, in 1970, the fungus was discovered in Brazil, again probably brought in accidentally by humans Once the barrier of the oceans had been breached, wind dispersal came into play Infected trees were isolated by creating an 80 km coffeeless 'safety zone' around the infected area, but within eighteen months the rust had jumped the gap in the direction of the prevailing winds Today, the fungus has spread throughout all the coffee- growing areas, including Colombia and the countries of Central America Fungicide applications are now part of the routine production practices on coffee plantations, despite the expense for small growers Good cultural management, taking into account the density of planting and the climate, is also paramount Rust-resistant strains of coffee have also been developed but the crop is of poorer quality Unless a truly rust-resistant variety with more desirable generic traits can be produced, coffee rust will have to be managed as a continuous epidemic on a perennial crop 97 Questions - Complete the chart below Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from Reading Passage for each answer 98 PRACTICE TELEVISION ADDICTION IS NO MORE METAPHOR The term "TV addiction" is imprecise, but it captures the essence of a very real phenomenon Psychologists formally define addiction as a disorder characterized by criteria that include spending a great deal of time using the thing; using it more often than one intends; thinking about reducing use or making repeated unsuccessful efforts to reduce use; giving up important activities to use it; and reporting withdrawal symptoms when one stops using it All these criteria can apply to people who watch a lot of television That does not mean that watching television, in itself, is problematic Television can teach and amuse it; it can be highly artistic; it can provide much needed distraction and escape The difficulty arises when people strongly sense that they ought not to watch as much as they and yet find they are unable to reduce their viewing Some knowledge of how television becomes so addictive may help heavy viewers gain better control over their lives The amount of time people spend watching television is astonishing On average, individuals in the industrialized world devote three hours a day to the activity - fully half of their leisure time, and more than on any single activity except work and sleep At this rate, someone who lives to 75 would spend nine years in front of the television Possibly, this devotion means simply that people enjoy TV and make a conscious decision to watch it But if that is the whole story, why so many people worry about how much they view? In surveys in 1992 and 1999, two out of give adults and seven out of ten teenagers said they spent too much time watching TV Other surveys have consistently shown that roughly ten per cent of adults call themselves TV addicts To study people's reactions to TV, researchers have undertaken laboratory experiments in which they have monitored the brain waves, skin resistance or heart rate of people watching television To study behaviour and emotion in the normal course of life, as opposed to the artificial conditions of the laboratory, we have used the Experiences Sampling Method (ESM) Participants carried a beeper, and we signaled them six to eight times a day, at random, over the period of a week; whenever they heard the beep, they wrote down what they were doing and how they were feeling 99 As one might expect, people who were watching TV when we beeped them reported feeling relaxed and passive The laboratory studies similarly show less mental stimulation, as measured by brain-wave production, during viewing than during reading What is more surprising is that the sense of relaxation ends when the TV is turned off, but the feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue Viewers commonly report that television has somehow absorbed or sucked out their energy, leaving them exhausted They say they have more difficulty concentrating after viewing than before In contrast, they rarely report such difficulty after reading After playing sports or doing hobbies, people report improvements in mood After watching TV, people's moods are about the same or worse than before Within moments of sitting or lying down and pushing the 'power' button, viewers report feeling more relaxed Because the relaxation occurs quickly, people are conditioned to associate viewing with rest and lack of stress The association is positively reinforced because viewers remain relaxed throughout viewing Thus, the irony of TV: people watch a great deal longer than they plan to, even though prolonged viewing is less rewarding In our ESM studies the longer people sat in front of the set, the less satisfaction they said they obtained from it When signaled, heavy viewers (those who consistently watch more than four hours a day) tended to report on their ESM sheets that they enjoy TV less than light viewers did (less than two hours a day) For some, a feeling of guilt that they are not doing something more productive may also accompany and reduce the enjoyment of prolonged viewing Researchers in Japan, the U.K and the U.S have found that this guilt occurs much more among middle-class viewers than among less affluent ones What is it about TV that has such a hold on us? In part, the attraction seems to arise from out biological 'orienting response' First described by Ivan Pavlove in 1927, the orienting response is an instinctive reaction to anything sudden or new, such as, movement or possible attack by a predator Typical orienting reactions include the following: the arteries to the brain grow wider allowing more blood to reach it, the heart slows down and arteries to the large muscles become narrower so as to reduce blood supply to them Brain waves are also interrupted for a few seconds These changes allow the brain to focus its attention on gathering more information and becoming more alert while the rest of the body becomes quieter 100 Question 14 – 17 Complete the labels on the diagram Choose your answers from the box beside the diagram NB: There are more words / phrases than spaces, so you will not use them all A Relaxed B Accelerated C Increased D Lengthened E Reduced F Stopped momentarily G Widened H Regulated 101 APPENDIX 6: INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT 1) Interview Transcript with student S3 (A) Teacher (T): Hi! We‘re going to have an informal interview today How did you feel when you did the pre-test? Student A (A): I found the test very difficult for me, especially the T/F/NG questions and Matching questions I had to read the texts two or three times to find the main idea of each paragraph but there were too many words that I did not know So I got really nervous and tried to speed up by choosing multiple choices randomly Still I ended up running out of time but not finished my test Also, there were other question types that I had never done before like the one with diagram, I mean diagram completion T: So what did you expect from the course? A: I wanted to improve my reading skills, read faster and more of the questions in 60 minutes…uhm and I wanted to get more correct answers with Heading Matching questions That was the most difficult type for me And with other types as well I want to practice more so that I not feel nervous when I take the real test T: OK So how did the course go with you? A: Well, the first few couples of weeks were really hard work because I had to spend much more time on reading than before But the lessons were clear to me The teacher was really specific in teaching us She showed us how to each of the question types step by step So we could understand what to and how to it well T: How did you find the instruction in the course? Did it help you when you did the exercises and practice tests? A: Oh yes, it helped me a lot At first I thought it would take a lot of time to follow all the steps in the procedure so I skipped some of them My results were not very good as other students so I changed to following all the steps the teacher showed us And I could see that I did not need to understand every word in the text to answer the questions So I actually saved time follow the steps and got a higher score So I think the instructions are helpful and practical T: Alright What about the question types that you found difficult before the course? A: Oh yes, the matching heading type I have an improvement on that type T: How much was the improvement? A: In the pre-test I only scored one for that type and even with that answer I was not sure 102 After the course I feel more confident doing matching heading and for the post-test I got out of answers correct I still need to practice more on this type T: OK Is there anything else that you want to improve with your Reading? A: Well after the course I am still weak at getting the organization of the text I think if I can improve this then my speed of doing the test will be higher and I will have time to review my answers at the end of the test T: Is there anything you want to change about the course? A: Well at first I really thought that I could not follow the course till the end because it was so intensive I wish there would have been more activities and more time to relax in between because reading for a long time is really hard by itself, let alone IELTS Reading T: Thank you so much I appreciate your time spent for this interview A: You are welcome 2) Interview transcript from student S21 (B) T: Hi How are you today? B: I‘m good Thanks T: Great We‘re going to have an informal interview today Is that OK? B: Okay, teacher T: Right How did you feel when I did the pre-test? B: Well I didn‘t feel confident about it at all I struggled a lot…with new words and the meaning of the text…The test was really long and although I tried to be focused I still got distracted T: Anything else? How did you find the questions? B: The questions were long and I found it difficult to identify the key words as I did not know the meaning of all the words For many questions I only guessed the answers T: What type of question did you find the most difficult in the pre-test? B: Well it was Summary Completion, because I did not understand what the texts were about T: Did the course help you with that type? B: Well, not much I still struggled with it a lot in the post-test T: How did you find the course in general? B: I think the course was too hard for me to follow It required a lot of hours studying – 103 three hours and a half or maybe more each week but I needed to focus on my speaking skill to prepare for the IELTS as well So I could not attend all of the lessons and also did not have enough time to practice tests I wish the course would have been less intensive, even if it would last for a longer time T: OK And how did you find the instructions in the course? Did you understand all of the instructions? B: Well they were really detailed I think but in my opinion it would be better if you make the students the same things as you instruct us through the task Because even though I understood all of the instructions you gave us, I could not remember all of them when I did the exercises, and on the handout they were written in English I think Vietnamese would be better to review and memorize T: Alright Did you find the activities helpful? B: I think they were quite useful But I think you should check on the group work more often T: OK Is there anything else you want to change about the course? B: Well, if the course could last for more weeks like I said I would want to learn about the new words in the reading texts I think it is still important for students to learn vocabulary to be better at reading T: Okay That‘s everything for now Thank you so much I wish you high score on the real test B: Thank you 104 ... Types of test preparation There are many ways to categorize language test preparation Based on the nature of the preparation instruction, Anastasi (1981) grouped test preparation into three broad... test preparation course with explicit reading strategy instruction at AMES English Language Center? What are students’ attitudes towards the explicit strategy instruction in IELTS Reading preparation. .. By the same token, Wikipedia (2017, para.1) regards test preparation (abbreviated Test Prep) or exam preparation as ―an educational course, tutoring service, educational material, or a learning