When Should Korean EFL College Students Skim to Read Effectively?

This study investigated the effect of skimming as before-reading and after-reading activities on Korean EFL college students’ reading comprehension performance. Two hundred and two college freshmen were divided into three treatment groups: (a) before-reading group was asked to skim a text before reading the text; (b) after-reading group was required to read the text first and then to skim; and (c) the combined group of before-reading and after-reading was asked to skim the text both before and after reading the text. Immediately after each treatment, they took the reading comprehension test to examine which was the most effective. The test was scored firstly by students’ peers and secondly by the first researcher, which was analyzed by the one way ANOVA. Interestingly, the after-reading group performed significantly better than the other groups. Also, among high proficiency students, both before-reading and after-reading groups got higher scores than the combined group, while the low proficiency students did not have significant results on the post-test among the groups. Based on the results, pedagogical implications of the findings for EFL reading instruction in L2 classrooms are discussed.