Promoting Tenth Graders' Reading Comprehension of Academic Texts in the English Class

This article reports on an action research project conducted in a public school in Bogota, Colombia, with tenth grade students. We decided to develop it because of the students' needs as well as the em phasis of the PEI (Proyecto Educativo Institucional = School Institutional Project), which is based on the requisite of improving reading comprehension. The project focused on the implementation of four lesson plans in which five reading strategies were applied. They were reading speed, non-text information, word attack skills, text attack and discursive strategies. Data collection was conducted by using observation, journals, interviews and questionnaires. These instruments provided information about the level of improvement in reading comprehension and evidenced advances in the students' performance when they read an academic text in English.