Browsing by Author "Achoui, Sana"

Despite the importance of critical reading in tertiary education, many ESL students are often passive consumers of texts, not questioning what they read and sometimes unable to read critically. The main aim of this study was to explore Malaysian university students’ use of six specific critical reading strategies, based on Facione (2013): interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation and self-regulation, in the reading of two English literary texts. This study also aimed to investigate students’ perceptions of reading literature texts in English. Data were collected through a qualitative approach incorporating a questionnaire, a think-aloud protocol involving a reading session and a retrospective interview, and a semi-structured interview. The results of this study show that the participants made varying use of combinations of the six critical reading strategies to help them understand literary texts, however, most participants did not use the evaluation strategy. This finding indicates a need for specific teaching of all these critical reading strategies. The results from the interviews suggest that these participants have little idea of what critical reading is or how to be a critical reader; even though they used critical reading strategies, they appear to be unaware of their use of these strategies.

Knowing the importance of vocabularies and vocabulary learning strategies (VLS), this study attempts to determine the vocabulary size of pre-university students and their preferred vocabulary learning strategies (VLS). The aim of this study was to examine the vocabulary learning strategies used by pre- university ESL learners and to investigate if there is any relationship between the learners’ vocabulary learning strategies and their vocabulary size. It also investigates if there is any effect of the vocabulary learning strategies on the vocabulary size of these ESL learners. 128 pre-university students (level 6 students – upper intermediate level) taking an intensive English course at the Centre for language and Pre-university development (CELPAD) were involved in the study. A vocabulary learning questionnaire based on Schmitt’s taxonomy (1997) and a vocabulary test based on Nation’s (2001) vocabulary size were used for data collection. The results of this study suggest that the ESL pre-university students preferred the discovery meaning category which was essential for their vocabulary development and learning. The most used strategies were “guessing the meaning of a new word from context” and “the use of the English-language media” while the least preferred strategy was “ask English teacher to check my flash cards or word lists for accuracy”. Results also showed that the majority (64.8%) of the students were considered as intermediate learners with vocabulary size score range of 6100-8100. Nevertheless, the most important finding of this study reveals that from the 58 strategies, only four strategies showed correlation and significant contributions (p< 0.05) towards the learners’ total vocabulary size.