The stimulation of the reading skills, among a2 level high school students from the empresarial moderno school, through the implementation of the context-based learning approach regarding false cognates activities

Abstract

English in this case as L2 and Spanish as L1 share a set of words that shape some morphological similarities that constitute a group of words normally known as Cognates; although they are almost written in the same way in both languages, it does not mean they always share the same meaning; so that, they can be True or False Cognates. Due to this, students can either achieve or not an effective interpretation of a reading material. Therefore, the problem that can emerge from this is the possible misinterpretation of some English messages read by Spanish speakers, since they tend to decode them based on morphology and not on the knowledge of the L2 language; then it is important the stimulation of the reading skills among A2 level high school students, through the implementation of, by means of this study, the Context-Based Learning (CBL) approach, regarding false cognates activities, in a research that might help develop better decoding skills of the L2 messages. To carry it out, a pre-test, an intervention class, and a post-test, all based on the CBL approach, were designed in order to apply them to 50 students from an educational institution located in Cali, Colombia. The analysis allowed to recognize the existence of a continuous confusion represented by the incorrect lexical decoding of words that share the same orthography/spelling but differ in meaning. In conclusion, the implementation of the CBL in the class and the integration of False Cognates inside written dialogues, allowed students to stimulate their reading comprehension skills while they were acquiring new vocabulary and realizing the importance of the context inside texts or real-life situations.