| Summary: | Reading is a key skill in modern society: not only it is part of a culture, but it even shapes the way we think. However, the understandings, inferences and interpretations of a text vary from person to person. Testing reading is an equally complex process.
Having a task associated with the text at hand may impact the reading process and the strategies used during it. The purpose of this study was to see how these vary when a learner has to only read, compared to when the learner has to face a set of multiple-choice (MC) questions.
For this, nine EFL students in 2nd of ESO – 7th grade were asked to read a B1 level text, five of which had to answer four MC questions, while the other four only had to read; during the task, concurrent verbal protocols were used to determine the reading strategies used, as well as a reading strategy checklist after the task as a form of retrospective data collection.
Results showed that the higher-level learners used more strategies than their lower-level peers, and that the ones that had to answer the MC questions used more strategies, regardless of the proficiency level.
Thus, teaching reading strategies in EFL classes may prove beneficial to boost reading proficiency and text understanding, and adding a set of questions about the text engages more strategies from the learner, further promoting text comprehension.
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