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Abstract
This quasi-experimental study investigates the effect of pre-reading lexical glossing and thematic clustering on the Egyptian EFL learners’ reading comprehension ability in relation to expository and narrative text types, and the participants’ attitudes towards pre-reading lexical assistance. Eighty-one linguistically homogenous learners enrolled in the advanced level of an English language proficiency course at a language centre in Cairo University were randomly divided into three equal-in-number groups. The first two groups received a treatment of pre-reading lexical assistance in the form of lexical glossing and thematic clustering respectively. The participants in the third control group received no pre-reading lexical assistance. The data elicited through a test of reading comprehension, written feedback entries, self-report questionnaires and semi-structured interviews was quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. Descriptive statistics, ANOVA, t test, MANOVA and Scheffe post hoc tests were employed to answer the research questions. Results showed that the pre-reading lexical assistance groups produced significantly higher comprehension scores than the control group, with an advantage of lexical glossing over thematic clustering. Besides, the findings revealed that there were significant differential effects of the text types on reading comprehension and that the participants performed better on expository texts than on narrative ones. Moreover, significant effects were detected when using pre-reading thematic clustering of words with expository text types. The outcomes indicated that more than 60% of the participants expressed their satisfaction with using pre-reading lexical assistance and the thematic clustering group had the most positive attitudes