A descriptive study of Thai EFL students' comprehension monitoring strategies when reading in English
Date
2018-07-23
Authors
Katib, Adisra
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This research describes and investigates comprehension monitoring
strategies of 16 EFL Thai second and fourth year undergraduate students at
Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, reading an English
expository text. All 16 subjects were selected from the Faculty of
Communication Arts and all performed well academically. The subjects
were placed into two English language proficiency levels — higher and
lower — as assessed by their grades in English and TOEFL scores. The
subjects were asked to verbalize their thoughts while reading, using the
think-aloud technique. The subjects were also asked to summarize the text
after the completion of the think-aloud task. In the first analysis, 28
strategies were identified and were arranged into six categories according
to their functional purposes. In the second analysis, the study explored
whether different English proficiency levels have an effect on the subjects’
strategy use. The results demonstrated that there were only three strategies
which had statistically significant differences between the two groups of
proficiency. The findings also showed the six most frequently used
strategies for each proficiency group were the same in rank order. The
findings suggest that differences in English proficiency may not have much
impact on strategy use by Thai readers who are successful in their
academic performance. They may use their acquired learning strategies
and their high cognitive and academic abilities to compensate for their
limited English language competence. The third analysis investigated
whether a two-year time difference in academic setting between the second
and fourth year students would have an effect on different strategy usage.
The findings showed that there was not much difference in strategy use
between these two groups. The findings suggest that a two-year time
difference in the foreign language academic setting may not play an
important role in different reading behaviours. In addition, since these
subjects were all young adults studying at the university level in the same
area of study, age might not be a key factor in the differences in the
performance of these two groups. This research also compares the
strategies identified in this study with the strategies in the literature, and
identifies efficient and inefficient reading behaviours. Individual
differences of reading behaviours among these 16 subjects are also noted.
Furthermore, these subjects are also placed into five types of categories
according to their reading behaviours. The research includes pedagogical
and research implications, acknowledges its limitations and concludes with
suggestions for future research.
Description
Keywords
English language, Study and teaching, Foreign speakers, Research