Journal of Global Research in Education and Social Science

Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) is an instructional framework integrating five motivational practices with six cognitive strategies in order to influence and improve reading comprehension. Accordingly, this study sought to investigate the pedagogical efficacy of CORI in improving reading comprehension ability and lexical knowledge of Iranian management students attending English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course. To this end, from the population of students studying management at Amin Institute of Higher Learning, a sample of 60 students, both male and female, were chosen based on a convenience sampling method.  They were then randomly assigned into two equal samples; namely, the control and experimental groups. The experimental group received instruction through the basic principles of CORI, while the control group was instructed by a traditional reading comprehension approach. Before the treatment, a pre-test, comprising 25 reading comprehension and 30 vocabulary multiple choice questions was administered to both control and experimental groups to measure the students’ entry behavior. After the treatment, a full term, a post-test was given to gauge the progress of the participants. The results obtained   from the application of the related statistical techniques revealed that the class instructed by the CORI approach outperformed the control group in terms of both reading comprehension and lexical gains. Notably, the results may have insightful implications for language teachers, EAP course designers and policy makers.