TITLE:
A Study on EFL Graduate Students’ Academic English Reading Strategies
AUTHORS:
Xiangyang Zhang
KEYWORDS:
Academic Reading, Reading Strategies, EFL, Graduate Students
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.12 No.6,
December
30,
2022
ABSTRACT: This study investigates the strategies perceived by a group of graduate students studying at a university in Thailand when reading English academic articles or books. The 60 EFL learners were graduate students at either master or doctoral level including both Thai and international students from other countries in different majors. First, they completed the academic reading strategy questionnaire survey. After that, 10 among them responded to a semi-structured interview in order to explore the reasons for their use of certain strategies. Deceptive statistics were employed to examine the frequency of students’ reading strategy use, and independent-samples t-tests were employed to compare the differences according to two variables of gender and field of study. The results revealed that the frequency of the participants’ overall academic reading strategies use fell into the high use level; the three subscales of reading strategies demonstrated a high to moderate use, with PROB and GLOB at high level, while SUP at moderate level; no individual reading strategy was found at the low-use level. Moreover, no significant difference was found in the frequency of the participants’ overall reading strategy use according to their gender and field of study, nor did GLOB and PROB vary significantly in terms of gender or field of study, but with one exception that Non-English majors employing SUP category significantly more frequently than the English majors. In addition, female students reported significantly higher use of three individual strategies than did their male counterparts, and six individual strategies were used significantly differently between the English majors and the non-English majors. The interview results provided the reasons for the top three and the least three used strategies. Finally, pedagogical implications of the findings and limitations are discussed in relation to academic reading strategies.