Japanese EFL Students’ Reading Processes for Academic Papers in English

Abstract

Academic reading has been less emphasized compared with academic writing as a site of research inquiry. Although some studies have examined reading strategy use in academic reading (e.g., Block, 1986;Plakans, 2009), these studies used short passages only, and there have been a few studies that have focused on the mental representation constructed while we read research papers (e.g., Wyatt et al., 1993). Considering that academic discourse has a particular, distinct structure (e.g., Swales, 1990), it is necessary to examine the process of reading academic papers separately from that of reading in general, focusing on the rhetorical particularities of academic discourse. Against this research background, we investigated how Japanese EFL students read English academic papers, focusing on the interactions among L2 proficiency, reading strategies, and the rhetorical features of the papers. We used the following methods: video observation, the "think-aloud protocol," document analysis of notes taken by the participants while reading, and a post-reading interview. The reading strategies identified on the basis of the think-aloud protocol were categorized into local, global, and metacognitive strategies. The main results were as follows. First, the Japanese EFL readers had difficulty recognizing academic discourse. Therefore, they could not read the papers efficiently. Second, the students focused on understanding formulas and figures presented in the documents. Third, although the students used local and global strategies frequently, their purposes in using these strategies varied depending on their L2 competence, their background knowledge about the topic of the paper, and their familiarity with the discipline-specific academic discourse.

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