Exploring the Useful Reading Strategies among EFL College Students in Taiwan*

doi:10.4236/chnstd.2013.24031

Paper Menu >>

Journal Menu >>

Chinese Studies

2013. Vol.2, No.4, 193-196

Published Online November 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/chnstd) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/chnstd.2013.24031

Open Access 193

Exploring the Useful Reading Strategies among EFL College

Students in Taiwan*

Kung Shan-Shan

Department of En gl i s h S t u d ie s , MingDao University, Changhua, Taiwan, China

Email: [email protected]

Received August 22nd, 2013; re vise d Sep tember 23rd, 2013; accepted Oct obe r 2nd, 2013

tribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

The major purpose of this study was to understand what the reading strategies the EFL students use more

or less among EFL college students in Taiwan. The study focused on three hundred and ninety-eight EFL

college students coming from seven colleges located in the north, central, and south Taiwan. The research

instrument was a questionnaire modified from Wan-Yin Lin’s Chinese reading strategies questionnaire

(2005). The collected data used the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 13.0 to

analyze the results. The findings of study included the following: first, higher grade students had more

variety in using reading strategies than lower grade students; and second, the higher grade students tended

to use integrated strategies more than lower grade students. According to the research findings, the re-

searcher provided some recommendations, such as teachers could be better guiders to help students un-

derstand the importance of reading in language learning. They can not just focus on teaching listening and

speaking, and should enhance the balance development in integrated reading strategies that helped stu-

dents could read fluently any English materials.

Keywords: Reading Strategies; EFL Students; Integrated Strategies

Introduction

From junior high to senior high, students usually learn the

four English skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing

step-by-step. Recently, the situation has changed. More and

more teachers would like to focus on the teaching of speaking

and listening in English to match the globalized world trend

and the needs of business. However, Pauston and Bruder (1976)

reported that when people learned the four skills of speaking,

listening, reading, and writing in a second language, reading

was usually the skill that English as Foreign Language (EFL)

students really wanted to learn and acquire. Therefore, the

study focused on exploring the use of reading strategies among

EFL college students in Taiwan and examined which reading

strategies students usually used or did not use for understanding

the English materials. All the information gathered from this

study helped teachers of EFL students understand the instruc-

tional implications found within literacy development. The

following questions guided this study:

1) Did Taiwanese EFL college students use reading strategies

to help them read? If so, what reading strategies did they use

more for helping them understand contents?

2) What reading strategies did they use less than others, or

never use during the reading process?

There were four reasons to show that this study was signifi-

cant. First, the research could help students be aware of what

their reading behaviors were and of what reading strategies they

used most or least when they read English materials. Students

could try to think about whether they could have made some

changes to their reading behaviors or could have enhanced the

use of reading strategies. Second, the results of the study pro-

vided information to students about the strategies that other

students used when they read English materials. Through the

transference of information, the students could learn about good

reading strategies they could use to help them to get the main

points from the reading texts. Third, the study provided some

information to the teachers to help them understand their stu-

dents’ reading behaviors and the reading strategies they used.

When teachers understood students’ reading processes, they

could try to adjust their teaching skills to help students to read

easier.

According to students’ reading situations, teachers could ar-

range the appropriate teaching materials for students. Finally,

the study could be used as a reference for further research to

help future researchers know what recent students’ reading

situations were and let them focus on the students’ weaknesses

to provide more useful suggestions and teaching strategies for

helping those students who had reading difficulties in English.

Through this study, the researcher expected that the EFL stu-

dents, teachers, and further researchers could get some useful

information to understand what the reading process for Tai-

wan’s EFL college students should include and to provide some

good suggestions for further studies in the field of reading.

Literature Review

Some researchers as Nuttall (1982) and Casanave (1988)

pointed out that reading was a process with which readers ac-

tively used some strategies to work with the meaning of the

*Short paper.

KUNG S.-S.

texts and then made sense from them. By the interesting inter-

actions from the readers and texts, more and more researchers

keep working with studies about the relationship between read-

ing comprehension and the use of reading strategies.

However, when talking about strategy and skill, it was ap-

parent that they were different. Strategy meant people used

planned methods and actions to achieve their goals, but skill

was a routine and reflex behavior. Because strategy was a con-

scious, specific, and integral planning, readers could use it to

handle different reading materials (Dole et al., 1991). Besides,

strategy was the result of consciously working toward goals. It

helped readers to understand the meaning of contents to find

out answers or attain a certain performance level in reading that

they want for themselves (Gagné, 1985).Pearson and Fielding

(1991) summarized what happened during their version of stra-

tegic reading:

“Students understand and remember ideas better when

they have to transform those ideas from one form to an-

other. Apparently it is in this transformation process that

the author’s ideas become [the] reader’s ideas, rendering

them more memorable. Examined from the teacher’s per-

spective, what this means is that teachers have many op-

tions to choose from when they try to engage students

more actively in their own comprehension: summarizing,

monitoring, engaging visual representation, and requiring

students to ask their own questions all seem to generate

learning” (p. 847).

Besides, Perkins (1992) also had a statement to suggest

teachers had to tell students the important ideas on both benefits

of requiring and using cognitive strategies:

“Complex cognition has more intrinsic interest and prom-

ises more payoff outside of school and later in life. But

consider the cost to learners: complex cognition demands

much more effort. It creates greater risk of failure. It in-

troduces the discomforts of disorientation, as learners

struggle to get their heads around difficult ideas. Peer

status for complex cognition is certainly mixed; who

wants to be known as a ‘brain’? And very commonly, so

far as grades and teacher approval go, complex cognition

buys no more than the simpler path of getting facts

straight and the algorithms right. No wonder, then, that

students perfectly reasonably do not automatically gravi-

tate toward complex cognition” (pp. 59-60).

Oxford (1992-1993) stated that students would like to use

their preferred strategies which reflected their learning styles.

For example, students in an analyzing learning style would like

to prefer a strategy such as rule-learning, while students with

global learning style would prefer to use strategies to find out

their picture (i.e., scanning, predicting) and help them to under-

stand the contents without knowing all the words (i.e., gestur-

ing). When mentioning reading strategy, different researchers

used different aspects to discuss it. Based on the other related

researches, the types of reading strategies could be classified by

their reading processes, characters, and functions. In some

reading teaching researches (Gagné, 1985; Vacca, 1981; Vacca

& Vacca, 1986), they divided the use of reading strategies into

three processes of before reading, during reading, and after

reading. Before reading, readers might use cues from the title of

article, or predict the contents to establish the interest to read

the articles. During reading, readers might choose the main

points to read or understand the relationship between sentences

to help them understand the contents. After reading, readers

might review the main points or summarize for the contents to

know if they understand what they read.

Some researchers (Bock, 1993; Keene & Zimmermann, 1997;

El-Koumy, 2004) mentioned that reading strategies can be di-

vided into cognitive and metacognitive styles. Cognitive strat-

egy meant readers had interaction with contents by using

strategies to help them understand the contents. Cognitive

strategies included visualizing, predicting, scanning, summa-

rizing, analyzing, making connection, underlining, and using

mnemonics, etc. El-Koumy (2004) stated that, “Metacognitive

strategy-often referred to as self-regulation strategies-refers to

the reader’s knowledge about the executive processes he or she

employs before, during, and after reading” (p. 16). They men-

tioned there were three main strategies in this area: planning,

self-monitoring, and self-assessment. Dutta (as cited in El-

Koumy, 2004) described that planning was used by readers to

make a comprehensive plan to understand the contents. Glazer

(as cited in El-Koumy, 2004) indicated that, “self monitoring-or

comprehension monitoring as it is often called-refers to the

readers’ regulation of his or her own comprehension during

reading” (p. 19). Schunk (1997) mentioned that metacognitive

strategy helped students check and adjust their reading strate-

gies for failure comprehension. Shoemaker (as cited in El-

Koumy, 2004) described self-assessment helped readers to

monitor and adjust their strategic thinking in literacy learning.

According to the reading styles that Carrell (1989) mentioned,

he divided reading strategies into repair, effective, and confi-

dent strategies. Repair strategy helped readers to understand the

contents when they did not have strong language ability, such

as using the context or the meaning of the sentence to solve

their vocabulary problem when they faced a new word during

their reading process. Effective strategy meant readers used

some strategies to help them read effectively during their read-

ing process, such as asking someone, taking notes, highlighting,

and summarizing, etc. Confident strategy helped readers to

decrease their fearfulness or increase their interest to read, in-

cluding reviewing the article, predicting the contents, and over-

view the table of contents. These strategies could help readers

to get new information and combine their own knowledge to

promote the understanding and memorizing of contents. There-

fore, the use of effective strategies could help readers think and

assist them to know how and when to solve their reading prob-

lems by their own knowledge (Pressley et al., 1989).

Carter & McGinnis (1967) described that the purpose of

reading is to gain the enjoyment and information from written

language. Reading is a developmental process in both of think-

ing and learning. It is an important way to communicate with

others and can be developed throughout life. Learning to read is

influenced by the individual’s level of physical and psycho-

logical development and is influenced by one’s surrounding.

Reading needed more than the accumulation from different

skills. It is a manifestation of the whole personality of the

reader and his behavior. Reading was a meaningful activity to

find out, and explain the ideas from the writers. Therefore, this

meant that reading was a complex language skill that could not

be focused on a certain way in order to develop it.

When people read a text, they usually attempted to under-

stand the meaning of what they read by using the visual clues of

spelling, experience or background knowledge. Reading was an

active process, so readers must use their various abilities that

Open Access

194

KUNG S.-S.

they have already acquired to interact with the authors’ texts

and then got main ideas or knowledge from them. These abili-

ties were usually varied. Wardhaugh (1969) figured out that

readers were usually able to react to the significant visual hints,

not the nonsignificant visual ones. This meant that readers

needed to use their short or long-term memories effectively

during the reading process. Reading was a different kind of

linguistic performance than listening as listening was different

than speaking. Reading materials were usually more difficult

than, for example, a spoken presentation; written language was

more complex, cautious, less redundant and edited than spoken

language. Therefore, the teaching of reading must be focused

on the total language program that reading played as an impor-

tant part. The program must emphasize how language was used

rather than how it should be used. Language in its all different

forms was useful for study and could provide various mean-

ingful experiences to students in all ages, so matching the total

language learning with the students’ learning abilities could

help students to develop reading ability more easily (Ward-

haugh, 1969).

Methods and Procedures

Instrumentation

The study used one questionnaire to explore the use of read-

ing strategies among EFL college students in Taiwan. The

questionnaire was based on a sample of the Chinese reading

strategy questionnaire from Wan-Yin Lin (2005). After modi-

fying and translating to English, it was used as the format for

the study. When students completed the questionnaire in Tai-

wan, they used the modified Chinese version which was trans-

lated from the English edition.

Selection of the Participants

The participants were selected from seven colleges located in

north, central and south of Taiwan. A total of five hundred and

nine students were from Taipei City, Taipei County, Hsinchu

City, Taichung County, Tainan City, and Kaohsiung City, par-

ticipated in this research study. They volunteered to fill out the

questionnaire. The five hundred and nine students were chosen

from academic standings in the colleges. These students were

not English majors but they were still required to take some

English courses.

Response Rate

The EFL students (N = 509) were selected from seven col-

leges which were located in north, central, and south Taiwan.

However, 111 students did not complete all the questions or

provided unclear answers or left some of blanks. Therefore, 398

questionnaires were completed and returned. 398 question-

naires were analyzed for the purpose of this study. The actual

response rate was 78.19%.

Results

The following findings were discovered through descriptive

statistical procedures to find out the correlations between the

mean scores for the results from the answers for each research

question. The following findings emerged:

1) In the first reading situation “when I read English mate-

rial”, strategy 2 “I focus on the first sentence of each paragraph

for helping me understand the main points of the whole para-

graph”, strategy 5 “I write Chinese annotation on the margin for

vocabulary words I don’t understand during reading”, and

strategy 7 “I predict the contents’ main points through the arti-

cles” were most used by the most freshmen, sophomore, junior,

and senior students. As for strategy 4 “I write down the key

points on the paper or the margin of each paragraph” and strat-

egy 6 “I read the first and last paragraphs, and then go back to

reread the paragraphs” were the strategies most students used

least.

2) In the second reading situation “during reading process”,

the strategy 9 “I use life experiences helping me understand the

meanings of texts”, strategy 12 “I use key words or sentences to

guess the main idea of the articles”, and strategy 13 “I guess the

main idea of articles through illustrations” were the most popu-

lar strategies which most participants would use to help them

comprehend the reading contents. Strategy 11 “I use the back-

ground knowledge of the English culture to understand the

contents” and strategy 16 “I discuss what I read with class-

mates” were the strategies that most participants used least.

3) In the third reading situation “When I do not understand a

vocabulary”, most participants would like to use strategy 19 “I

use other words in the sentence to infer the meaning of vocabu-

lary” to solve their vocabulary problems during reading process.

As for strategy 20 “I use its pronunciation to perceive its mean-

ing” and strategy 21 “I analyze its suffix and prefix to get its

meaning” were the two strategies that most participants did not

use.

4) In the reading situation of “when I do not understand a

sentence”, most participants liked to use strategy 22 “I use the

context (topic, subject) to derive the meaning of each sentence”

to help them understand the meaning of a sentence. Strategy 24

“I take grammar analysis (ex: finding subject and verb etc.) to

understand the meaning of sentences” and strategy 25 “I ana-

lyze the structure of sentences (ex: sample sentence, adjective

clause, or adverb clause etc.) to derive at the meaning of sen-

tence” were least used by the most participants to solve their

sentence problems during their reading process.

5) In the reading situation of “when I don’t understand (in-

cluding vocabulary and sentences), except above reading strate-

gies”, the strategy 30 “I decrease my reading speed” and strat-

egy 31 “I read the difficult parts several times” were the more

popular strategies used by the participants. As for the strategy

34 “I will memorize the vocabulary pertaining to the contents

before reading”, most participants used it less to help them

understand the contents.

Conclusion

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of read-

ing strategies among EFL college students in Taiwan. Through

the research findings, the study found that most students, in-

cluding those with fewer learning experiences, would choose

appropriate reading strategies to help them read fluently and

effectively when they met the reading problems during their

reading process.

The study has presented a lot of information about the use of

reading strategies among EFL college students in Taiwan. Al-

though the study was limited by three hundred and ninety-eight

students coming from seven colleges located in the parts of

north, central, and south Taiwan, the findings may be used to

predict the possible Taiwanese EFL students’ viewpoints of

Open Access 195

KUNG S.-S.

Open Access

196

learning in reading. The results of this study may become a

valuable reference for further research in teaching reading; for

this reason, several recommendations made from the finding

and conclusion were listed below.

1) Teachers should teach integrated strategies to the students,

not just focus on teaching cognitive or metacognitive strategies.

The strategies such as compensation, memory, social, and af-

fective strategies should be taught to help students understand

the whole shape of strategies (Oxford, 1992/1993).

2) Because some strategies that were less often or never heard

about by the students were used, teachers should have a respon-

sibility to teach those useful strategies to students to help them

understand what they read and enjoy in the reading process.

3) Future studies can investigate if teaching particular read-

ing strategies results in better reading scores on standardized

tests.

REFERENCES

Bock, S. (1993). Developing materials for the study of literature. Eng-

lish Teaching Foru m, 31, 3-9.

Carter, H. L. J., & McGinnis, D. J. (1967). Reading: A key to academic

success. Dubuque, IA: WM. C. Brown Company Publishers.

Casanave, C. P. (1988). Comprehension monitoring in ESL reading: A

neglected essential. TESOL Quarterly, 22, 282-302.

http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3586937

Dole, J. A., Duffy, G. G., Roehler, L. R., & Pearson, P. D. (1991).

Moving from the old to new: Research on reading comprehension in-

struction. Revi ew of Educational Research, 61, 239-264.

El-Koumy, A. S. A. K. (2004). Metacognition and reading comprehen-

sion: Current trends in theory and research. ERIC Document No.

ED 490569, Washington, DC: American Educational Research As-

sociation.

Gagné, E. D. (1985). The cognitive psychology of school learning.

Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company.

Keene, E., & Zimmermann, S. (1997). Mosaic of Thought: Teaching

Comprehension in a Reader’s Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heine-

mann.

Lin, W. Y. (2005). Investigating Taiwanese Spanish learners’ meta-

cognitive awareness in reading: A case study of Spanish students at

Providence University in Taiwan. Unpublished Master Dissertation,

Taichung: Provi dence University.

Nuttall, C. (1982). Teaching reading skills in a foreign language. Lon-

don: Richard Clay Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk.

Oxford, R. L. (1992/1993). Language learning strategies in nutshell:

Update and ESL suggestions. TESOL Journal, 2, 18-22.

Paulson, C. B., & Bruder, M. N. (1976). Teaching English as a second

language: Techniques and procedures. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop

Publishers, Inc.

Pearson, P. D., & Fielding, L. (1991). Comprehension instruction. In R.

Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, & P. D. Pearson (Eds.). Hand-

book of reading research (Vol. 2, pp. 815-860). New York: Long-

man.

Perkins, D. N. (1992). Smart schools: Better thinking and learning for

every child. New York: Free Press.

Pressley, M., Johnson, C. J., Symons, S., McGoldrick, J. A., & Kurita, J.

A. (1989). Strategies that improve children’s memory and compre-

hension of text. The Elementary School Journal, 90, 3-32.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/461599

Schunk, D. (1997). Self-monitoring as a motivator during instruction

with elementary school students. ERIC Document No. ED 404035,

Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Vacca, R. T. (1981). Content area reading. Boston, MA: Little, Brown

and Company.

Vacca, R. T., & Vacca, J. A. L. (1986). Content area reading. Boston,

MA: Little, Brown Company.

Wardhaugh, R. (1969). Reading: A linguistic perspective. United States

of America: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.