Procedure
As stated earlier, the students participating in this study were enrolled in the
Reading Academic English course, so the main objective of this course was to improve
the students’ reading ability for academic purposes. However, the researcher asked for
permission from the course instructor to add the instruction of prepositions to their
regular class. In order to encourage the students to participate in all sessions of the
study, they were informed that if they participated in all activities including a pre-test,
three lessons, and post-tests, they would be awarded extra five points added
to their total scores for the course. These three lessons, taking about 30 minutes
each within eight days, were taught by the researcher using the translation method
is promised on the notion that learners must comprehend what they read or hear before
their attention can be drawn to form within the input” (p. 599). Keeping this in
mind, I assumed that translation was an obvious way to help the students understand
the target input.