Assessing and Improving General English University Students’ Main Sub-skills of Reading Compression: A Case of University of Bojnord

Abstract

General English course at Iranian universities has always been a controversial issue since the students taking this course are rather weak in English proficiency and need more authentic instructions based on accurate need analysis.The materials applied in this course are mainly focused on reading comprehension. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to improve General English university students' main sub-skills of reading comprehension and see the effect of the possible changes in terms of time and the fields of study of the students. To do this, 168 university students taking General English course at university of Bojnord, including humanities, engineering, physical education, and sciences, received instruction on the main sub-skills of reading comprehension after taking a pre-test sample TOELF section of reading comprehension. After 16 sessions of 90 minute instruction, they took the post-test section of TOEFL sample of reading comprehension. Mixed between within subject analysis of variance was used to assess the impact of instruction for the four groups of students from pre-test to post-test. The findings of the study indicated that the effect of instruction in terms of time, from pre-test to post-test, and the interaction of time and fields of study were significant. Besides, changes for 10 sub-skills were the same among the four fields of study.Keywords: General English, reading comprehension, skills IntroductionThe problem related to the reading comprehension is one of the most serious problems in higher. However, incapability of reading comprehension is often not recognized by students and lecturers until they entrance into academic courses. Levine, Ferenz, and Reves (2000) hold: "The ability to read academic texts is considered one of the most important skills that university students of English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) need to acquire" (p. 1). There has been a long productive line of L2 reading research establishing the central importance of reading skills and strategies in successful processing in reading comprehension (Anderson, 1991;Block, 1992;Ikeda & Takeuchi, 2006;McNeil, 2011;Zhang & Wu, 2009). However, many students come into higher education with no training for the reading skills. Thus, when forced to read a pervasive mass of texts, they often utilize fruitless and inefficient strategies and skills (Arnold, 2009; * Acknowledgements: I gratefully acknowledge the project reported here was supported by a grant-in-aid of research from Anmarkrud, Bråten, & Strømsø, 2014;Bråten & Strømsø, 2011;Kobayashi, 2010;Mason, Scirica, & Salvi, 2006). The failure in reading comprehension might be due to students' low level of reading strategy awareness and lack of metacognitive knowledge (Berkowitz & Cicchelli, 2004;Chen, Gualberto, & Tameta, 2009). In addition, the Iranian education system concentrates still on knowledge aspects of learning rather than practical aspects. Hence, students are coming from the insufficient task demands of high school and the fact ...

Item Analysis of Reading Comprehension Test for Post-Graduate Students

“…The items were constructed based on ten reading passages with the topics ranging from education, literature, social sciences, and others. The questions for each passage, as shown in Table 1, aim at assessing reading skills, including skills in skimming for main idea, scanning for stated detailed information, deducing meaning of unfamiliar words, pronoun resolution, making inference, understanding unstated information, and scanning to locate specific information (Alderson, 2000;Shirvan, 2016). 4,6,9,15,16,19,27,28,32,39,47,50,55,57,62,65,66,6 8,74,77, 80,84,85,86,89 ,96,97,100 Deducing the meaning and the use of unfamiliar lexical item 32…”